Christianity

Introduction

More surprising is the fact that the Jews’ constant experience of misfortune did not kill their faith in their own destiny. Instead it drove them to conceive of their God not simply as all-powerful, but as passionately concerned with their response to him, in anger as well as in love. Such an intensely personal deity, they began to assert, was nevertheless the God for all humanity. He was very different from the supreme deity who emerged from Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato: all-perfect, therefore immune to change and devoid of the passion which denotes change. The first generations of Christians were Jews who lived in a world shaped by Greek elite culture. They had to try to fit together these two irreconcilable visions of God, and the results have never been and never can be a stable answer to an unending question. loc: 130   

The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again. loc: 218   

Repeatedly the Bible has come to mean salvation to a particular people or cultural grouping by saving not merely their souls, but their language, and hence their very identity. loc: 223   

This was a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works. Jesus seems to have maintained that the trumpet would sound for the end of time very soon, and in a major break with the culture around him, he told his followers to leave the dead to bury their own dead (see p. 90). Maybe he wrote nothing because he did not feel that it was worth it, in the short time left to humanity. Remarkably quickly, his followers seemed to question the idea that history was about to end: they collected and preserved stories about the founder in a newly invented form of written text, the codex (the modern book format). They survived a major crisis of confidence at the end of the first century when the Last Days did not arrive - perhaps one of the greatest turning points in the Christian story, although we know very little about it. loc: 263   

Topic: Chapter 1 Greece and Rome (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE)

1 Greece and Rome (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) loc: 371   

GREEK BEGINNINGS loc: 372   

logos means far more than simply ‘word’: logos is the story itself. Logos echoes with significances which give voice to the restlessness and tension embodied in the Christian message. It means not so much a single particle of speech, but the whole act of speech, or the thought behind the speech, loc: 376   

man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has also ended up in a Greek form, ‘Jesus’), his followers added ‘Christos’ as a second name, after he had been executed on a cross.2 It is notable that they felt it necessary to make this Greek translation of a Hebrew word, ‘Messiah’, or ‘Anointed One’, when they sought to describe the special, foreordained character of their Joshua. loc: 381   

The name ‘Christ’ underlines the importance of Greek culture from the earliest days of Christianity, as Christians struggled to find out what their message was and how the message should be proclaimed. So the words ‘logos’ and ‘Christos’ tell us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity. loc: 385   

they were in fact keenly interested in other sophisticated cultures, particularly in two great powers which affected them: the Persian (Iranian) Empire, which came to dominate their eastern flank and rule many of their cities, and south across the Mediterranean the Egyptian Empire, whose ancient civilization stimulated their jealous imitation and made them keen to annex and exploit its agreeably mysterious reserves of knowledge. loc: 407   

I. Greece and Asia Minor loc: 411   

The portrayal of human beings tended away from the personal towards the abstract, which suggested that human beings could indeed embody abstract qualities like nobility, just as much as could the gods. Moreover, Greek art exhibits a fascination with the human form; it is the overwhelming subject of Greek sculpture, the form in which gods as well as humans are portrayed to the exclusion of any other representational possibility.5 The fascination extended to a cult of the living and breathing body beautiful, at least in male form, loc: 437   

Greek gods are rather human; so may humans be rather like gods, and go on trying to be as like them as possible? The remarkable self-confidence of Greek culture, the creativity, resourcefulness and originality and the consequent achievements which have been borrowed by Christian culture, have much to do with this attitude to the gods embedded in the Homeric epics. It is very different from the way in which the Jews came to speak of the remote majesty of their one God, the all-powerful creator, loc: 443   

however monumental Greek temples appear, their chief function was not to house a large worshipping congregation, but to house a particular god, like the shrine-churches dedicated to an individual holy figure which Christians built later. Temples were served by priests, who performed local rituals for a god or gods in approved customary fashion, but who were not normally seen as a caste apart from the rest of the population. They were doing a job on behalf of the community, rather like other officials of the city, who might collect taxes or regulate the market. So Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values, and it was not policed by a self-perpetuating elite entrusted with any task of propagating or enforcing it. loc: 452   

Within the common Greek culture, then, was an urge to understand and create a systematic structure of sacred knowledge which ordered their everyday life. loc: 466   

Greek curiosity created the literary notion of allegory: a story in literature which must be read as conveying a deeper meaning or meanings than is at first apparent, with the task of a commentator to tease out such meanings. Much later, first Jews and then Christians treated their sacred writings in the same way. loc: 469   

what raised man above the level of barbarism . . . to live well instead of merely living, was his membership of an actual, physical city.’7 loc: 493   

Ekklesia is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means ‘Church’, but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the assembly of citizens of the polis who met to make decisions.…the ekklesia is the embodiment of the city or polis of God, lurking in the word ekklesia is the idea that the faithful have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the polis, loc: 503   

the word ‘church’ or in Scots English as ‘kirk’. This started life as an adjective which emerged in late Greek, kuriakē, ‘belonging to the Lord’, and because of that, it emphasizes the authority of the master, rather than the decision of those assembled. The tension between these perspectives has run through the history of ecclesia/kirk, and is with Christians still. loc: 506   

if a tyrannos was to exercise authority without any traditional or religious justification, there would have to be some other basis for government. The solution which the Greeks adopted held great significance for the future. The inhabitants of the polis who had acquiesced in the upheaval would decide on laws with which their community would be governed. loc: 524   

large numbers of ordinary people who were not privileged by birth or divine favour were indeed charged with responsibility for their own future and the future of their community. This was a frightening responsibility. Could frail human beings bear the emotional load? This is surely one of the chief reasons why the Greeks searched for meaning in cosmos and society with an intensity unparalleled elsewhere in Mediterranean civilization, and why they were more inclined than others to detach that search from structures of traditional religion. loc: 558   

The grotesque absurdity of killing a man who was arguably Athens’s greatest citizen on charges of blasphemy and immorality impelled Plato to see a discussion of politics as one facet of discussions of justice, the nature of morality and divine purpose - in fact to see the two discussions as interchangeable. loc: 587   

his view of reality and authenticity propelled one basic impulse in Christianity, to look beyond the immediate and everyday to the universal or ultimate.…his conception of what God’s nature encompasses: oneness and goodness. loc: 607   

For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato’s God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live - indeed, have any meaningful contact with it. loc: 620   

An audience at an open-air Greek theatre, sitting massed in the sun, characteristically overlooking a panoramic landscape stretching behind the stage, was given the chance to ponder extreme versions of the sort of situations on which they might find themselves voting in the assembly of the polis. 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, loc: 662   

HELLENISTIC GREECE loc: 720   

A much enriched variety of encounters in religion and culture was paired with a steep decline in political choice for the inhabitants of these poleis. loc: 759   

a gradual closing down on the exuberant creativity which had been so prominent in Classical Greece. A strain of pessimism began to run through Hellenistic culture, redolent of Plato’s pessimism about everyday things, his sense of their unreality and worthlessness.29 loc: 762   

If philosophers could no longer hope to alter the policies of cities by influencing the thought of the people in the marketplace, and monarchs seemed impervious to the instruction of the most cultivated tutors, philosophy might as well concentrate on the inward life of the individual which no mighty ruler might tamper with. It became concerned with the proper cultivation of the self. loc: 764   

where the everyday world was of little account to the true idealist, curiosity expressed in practical creativity was no longer much valued. There was little follow-up to the remarkable advances seen in Classical Greece in the understanding of technology, medicine and geography. loc: 773   

ROME AND THE COMING OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE loc: 780   

Rome’s sheer lack of resources made its people acutely aware that their only assets were their energies in war and their determination to survive; loc: 786   

the Romans had very little sense of racial exclusiveness. They gave away Roman citizenship to deserving foreigners…the effect was to give an ever-widening circle of people a vested interest in the survival of Rome. loc: 814   

It might have been his pride in this status of universal citizen which first suggested to Paul that the Jewish prophet who had seized his allegiance in a vision had a message for all people and not just the Jews. loc: 817   

For all that his own military prowess was dubious, Augustus and his successors tore down political frontiers all round the Mediterranean, and by controlling piracy, they made it comparatively safe and easy to travel from one end of the sea to the other. loc: 858   

Augustus… did not actually claim divine honours, but he raised no objection to a system of honours in which offerings and sacrifices were made to his genius, the sacred force or guardian spirit which guided his personality and actions; loc: 865   

although this was politically risky at first, by the late third century it had become routine for emperors to claim divine status. Aristocratic Romans resented worshipping a man who had once been a colleague. loc: 870   

This divine leader attached himself to the traditional gods of Rome (a pantheon rather like that of the Greeks). For many aristocratic Romans there would now be a complex of emotions associated with this amalgam of the political and the divine. Traditional duty demanded that they take their part in ancient cults: the worship of the pantheon and the priesthoods associated with it were inseparable from Roman identity, loc: 876   

the powerful were now well advised to keep an eye on how the emperor treated the many religions of his subjects. Whatever religion any individual emperor chose to favour would arouse the same set of associations between politics and the world beyond as the imperial cult encouraged by Augustus. loc: 882   

There were plenty of unofficial competitors to the Roman pantheon, now that gods of all names and descriptions were able to take holiday trips along the sailing routes of a Mediterranean Sea united by Roman military might. Fertility cults in plenty arrived from the East, or more reflective religions like Iranian Mithraism, which described life as a great struggle between light and darkness, good and evil. loc: 884   

Topic: Chapter 2 Israel (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE)

2 Israel (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) loc: 889   

A PEOPLE AND THEIR LAND loc: 890   

Through this curve of hills there is only one major north-south pass, guarded by an ancient strongpoint now called Megiddo. This is the chief passage point for land traffic from Egypt north-east to all the lands of the Middle East and beyond, loc: 911   

The generally fragile fertility of the soil is a preoccupation of its people; it was one of the distinctive features of the Jews that they became fiercely opposed to rival religions stressing a concern with fertility, while at the same time they stubbornly maintained their attachment to their complex, difficult territory. loc: 927   

Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. loc: 940   

Using the Bible’s own internal points of reference, the promises to the Patriarchs would have been made in a period around 1800 BCE. loc: 945   

One silence is significant: there is very little reference to the Patriarchs in the pronouncements of ‘later’ great prophets like Jeremiah, Hosea or the first prophet known as Isaiah, whose prophetic words date from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.…the stories of the Patriarchs, as we now meet them in the biblical text, post-date rather than predate the first great Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries,…Genesis simply does not add up as a historical narrative when it is placed in a reliably historical wider context. loc: 962   

Israel is engaged in constant struggle with other peoples of the land, and in fact never finally dislodges them all, a rueful and realistic underlying theme within the book. The writer of Judges is much concerned with a threat to the Children of Israel from one of these peoples, the Philistines. Philistines in fact bequeathed their name to the land and therefore built into the word ‘Palestine’ is a reminiscence of Israel’s enemies. But the Philistines also performed a service to Israel, because they securely date the Book of Judges by their presence in its narrative. Sources discovered by modern archaeologists reveal that the Philistines did not just fight Israel but also came into frequent conflict with the Egyptian Empire. Consequently they left abundant traces in Egyptian records, which show the Philistines came over the sea from the west and occupied the coastal zone of Palestine between 1200 and 1050, as part of the same widespread disruption which had destroyed Mycenae (see p. 20). loc: 978   

in the minds of the Egyptian monument-reading public, this people is clearly expected to be associated with ‘seed’, or grain. So we could conclude that ‘Israel’ was then known as a people of farmers perhaps scattered throughout the wider territory of Canaan, but that already they possessed a common name loc: 990   

The Book of Judges consistently tells Israel’s story in reference to the one God, who called the people of Israel (with intermittent success) to be faithful to his commands. This probably reflects the reality that Israel’s identity stemmed from their religion: maybe religion is all they had to unite them, rather than ethnicity or common origins. loc: 992   

appears as ‘Habiru’ in a wide variety of times and places from Egypt to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value.11 loc: 996   

something remarkable seems to have happened to the groups of Habiru who massed in Canaan from the late thirteenth century BCE, whether from Egypt or elsewhere: they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or older shrines. loc: 1001   

There is frequent and uninhibited mention of sacred trees and stones, which do not figure in later Jewish cultic practice. Most interesting is a series of references to gods associated with particular Patriarchs. So we have the ‘Fear’ of Isaac the son of Abraham (Genesis 31.53), the ‘Mighty One’ of Jacob (Genesis 49.24) and perhaps the ‘Shield’ of Abraham (Genesis 15.1). At Genesis 31.53 a dispute involving Jacob is settled by appealing to the judgement of the disputing parties’ respective personal gods, the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, loc: 1012   

the moment when Moses found that a bush burning in the desert gave him a revelation about these personal gods. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, speaking in the bush, called himself by a single name that is not a name, ‘I will be who I will be’, which is an explanation of a name used thousands of times throughout the Hebrew scripture, Yahweh.14…effect the story tells of the recognition of a new god, loc: 1022   

This was a God whose cult was not tied to a particular sacred place, unlike the old Canaanite cults in the land which the Israelites sought to conquer in the time of the Judges. Instead this God revealed his identity in the context of individual human lives, in all their changeability and battles with the divine - to wanderers like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses.16 Around such a personal god, who announced a new identity for himself, the dispossessed, the migrants, the Habiru, could themselves find comfort and a new identity. loc: 1025   

It is likely to have been an astute political move for the usurper-king to choose this city as a new capital in an effort to head off jealousy between rival groupings in Israel. It was a natural political consequence that he lent respectability to his venture by relocating in Jerusalem a cultic symbol of Yahweh, a sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant.…This temple began to outdo any rival sacred cultic sites created or inherited by the religion of Yahweh, loc: 1048   

These thousand years of Jewish history between David and Jesus Christ the ‘Son of David’ are also effectively the first millennium of Christian history, for that span of time established key notions which would shape Christian thinking and imagery: for instance, the central importance of the kingdom of God’s chosen one David and of the Temple in Jerusalem. There took shape a history of divinely foreordained salvation for the Jewish people, shot through with retribution for their constant backsliding and misunderstanding of God’s purposes. From a different perspective, the same history is a story of a struggle to establish that Yahweh was one supreme God, with neither effective rivals nor companions (for instance, a female consort).20 loc: 1053   

the kings of Israel had to retreat to the northern city of Samaria. With their control of the strategic pass of Megiddo, they were more exposed to the commerce and activities of great powers to the south and north, so they were more cosmopolitan and more inclined to take an interest in other cultures and religions loc: 1064   

The gathering crisis for the two kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries reinforced the role in Jewish culture and society of figures who presented themselves as mouthpieces of Yahweh, carrying urgent messages for his people: the prophets. loc: 1080   

While only a few remnants of the pronouncements of Elijah or his fellow prophets of the ninth century survive embedded in later stories, the biblical record of eighth-century prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah, the first Isaiah) probably represents the earliest sustained sequences in the Hebrew scriptures in something like their original form: these are impassioned, individual voices, not a careful editorial compilation from patches of earlier prose.…the common feature of such prophecy: rather than attacking individuals, it indicts all society. loc: 1110   

the eighth-century prophets understood the international situation, with its constant threats of annihilation by Assyrian military might, and perceived that the only thing which could save their people from long-term annihilation was that obedience to Yahweh for which Elijah and his fellow prophets had fought in the previous century. And Yahweh was powerful enough to decide the course of history - occasionally these prophets were prepared to proclaim that he was lord of universal history and of nations beyond their own. It was an astonishing claim for this people who were apparently helpless before the great empires of their day: loc: 1119   

The kingdom’s political turbulence culminated in a coup d’état which around 640 BCE killed King Amon of Judah and installed his young son Josiah as a puppet ruler. As the boy grew up, his energy and zeal were harnessed to push forward a reform programme which, in the way of such innovations in the ancient world, was presented as the rediscovery of a venerable document: a code of law, attributed to Moses himself. loc: 1134   

Throughout the Deuteronomic Code, there is an emphasis on the pure worship of Yahweh alone, and it orders its devout readers to be savage to those within Israel who might suggest religious deviations…It also emphasizes the idea of ‘covenant’, a treaty: Yahweh has made a covenant with his people and it is up to them to keep its conditions. loc: 1144   

In an operation of remarkable scholarly and literary creativity which probably involved many collaborators working over several decades, older documents were edited and incorporated into a series of books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah) which carefully told the story of Israel’s triumphs and tragedies in relation to its faithfulness to Yahweh. loc: 1152   

the Jews likewise began to focus their religious identity on the contents of a book. loc: 1158   

around 586 BCE the Babylonians sacked the already shattered city, destroyed the Temple and carried off many people from Judah to exile in Babylon. Those exiled are likely to have been community leaders; those left behind were apparently mostly of little account. loc: 1167   

THE EXILE AND AFTER loc: 1170   

the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE. There could be no independent native monarchy now, for the rebuilding was thanks to the generous spirit of the new conqueror Cyrus and his successors. So the Temple and its priesthood became the absolute centre of Jewish identity, as well as being the only significant institution in Jerusalem, and remained so for the next half-millennium. loc: 1173   

The exiles and their descendants continued to feel condescension or hostility to these others as ‘the people of the land’, a people who had not shared in the sufferings of God’s chosen people - had not sat by the waters of Babylon and wept remembering Zion.32 loc: 1178   

More profoundly, post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God’s purposes: he was called the Adversary, Hassatan, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures. loc: 1192   

Some Jews felt that any questioning of or search for understanding of their tragedy was impious as well as a waste of energy. loc: 1199   

Writers seeking to rebuild Israel gave unambiguous answers to the great question aroused by Jewish experiences after 586. They created new sets of laws and careful restorations and extensions of past ceremonial practice in the Temple, taking care that most of it was represented as a return to ancient decrees of the Lord from before the Exile. loc: 1214   

Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh’s religion - or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the Habiru. From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. loc: 1220 

Note: It would seem to me to be fairly easy to test the hypothesis that the Habiru were genetically diverse, unless, of course, there were big genetic bottlenecks in the history of the Jews. Is that what he is suggesting happened with the Babylonian captivity? What to make of the Aaronic claims in Before the Dawn?

It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.36 loc: 1224   

they did succeed in winning independence for Judaea under a dynasty of native rulers, known from an earlier ancestor as the Hasmoneans. These descendants of heroes in the war of independence now formed a succession of high priests for the Jerusalem Temple. During this period Judaea could claim to be a significant power in the Middle East, loc: 1235   

these are among the most important stories of Jewish history, the centrepiece, for instance, of the great festival of Hanukkah. loc: 1242   

Synagogues were remarkable institutions, with little other parallel in the ancient world. loc: 1252   

This was not just education for an elite, as was the case in Greek society, but education for everyone in the Jewish community; and it had a strong moral emphasis, unlike the concentration on cultic practice in the many other religions of the Mediterranean world. Judaism could make claim to providing a philosophy of life as well as a series of observances and customs for approaching the divine, loc: 1257   

If worship in the synagogue centred on the reading of God’s word from written texts, this demanded that there should be common consent throughout the Jewish community in the Mediterranean as to what could and could not be read. loc: 1262   

a larger number of other books, supposedly seventy, were no longer to be treated as having the same degree of authority as the twenty-four.41…a great number of texts which vary in date from the second century BCE to the first CE. loc: 1290   

Within this literature there is a preoccupation with telling the story of the Last Days, when the wretchedness and suffering of Israel in the present would be given a glorious reward and God’s purposes made clear: this genre of text is called ‘apocalyptic’ loc: 1292   

Alexandria: a symbol of the success of Hellenistic culture throughout the eastern Mediterranean. By the time of Jesus there may have been a million Jews there, the largest single community of Jews outside Palestine, and they were kept from dominating city politics only by the exclusive practices of their religion.45 loc: 1303   

In general these Hellenized Jews were much more interested in winning respect from Greeks for their culture than Greeks were interested in Judaism. They found that Greek reaction to what the translation revealed of Hebrew sacred literature posed problems: Greeks respected such ancient writings, but were also puzzled that a God who was supposed to be so powerful would do strange things like walk in the Garden of Eden or indulge in arguments with earthly men like Lot or Jonah. loc: 1313   

stories must conceal deeper layers of truth and so must be allegories.…the allegorical approach became naturalized among Alexandrian Jews in the biblical commentaries of Jesus Christ’s Jewish contemporary the scholar and historian Philo.47 loc: 1318   

Following Greek thought, Jews embraced the concept of nothingness, and that gave them a new perspective on creation. loc: 1322   

before the time of the Maccabees, Jewish discussion of God had shown little interest in the nature of the afterlife; Judaism was concerned with this life and with interpreting the many tragedies that happened to people on earth. loc: 1328   

A new impulse to develop ideas about the afterlife seems to have been provoked by the terrible deaths of some of the heroes of the Maccabean war of independence, loc: 1331   

Perhaps, then, the resurrection of the martyrs would be in a life to come, and the reward should be specific to individual suffering; this implied the prolonging of a recognizable personal existence.49 loc: 1334   

vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself. loc: 1338   

It is unprecedented in Jewish sacred literature in spelling out the idea of an individual resurrection of a soul in a transformed body in the afterlife - though still not for everyone!51 loc: 1343   

the Romans invaded Judaea in 63 BCE as part of their mopping-up operations around the conquest of their real prizes, the Seleucid and Egyptian empires. A mixture of deportees from this latest catastrophe for the Jews, together with generations of traders making the best of a bad situation, created an increasingly large and flourishing Jewish community in Rome itself,…in 37 BCE the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean ruler and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. This puppet king, an outsider whose forebears came from the territory to the south of Judaea which the Romans called Idumea (Edom), was Herod, ‘the Great’. loc: 1355   

During the first century CE the Romans experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and direct imperial rule of parts of Palestine through a Roman official - loc: 1362   

Sadducees provided the elite which ran the Temple.…they were the most flexible of our four groups in relation to outsiders. For them, it was enough to keep the basic commands of the Law in the scriptures and not to add the complex additional regulations which governed the everyday life loc: 1369   

The Essenes left ordinary society by setting up their own separate communities, usually well away from others, with their own literature and their own traditions of persecution by other Jews. loc: 1380   

The Zealots held a militant version of the same Essene theme of separation: for them, the only solution to the humiliation of Roman rule over the Jewish homeland was to take up Maccabean traditions of violent resistance, and it was they who gave impetus to the successive disastrous revolts which by the mid-second century CE had shattered Jewish life in Palestine (see pp. 106-9). loc: 1384   

Topic: Chapter 3: A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE)

3: A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE) loc: 1398  

BEGINNINGS loc: 1399  

In the Gospels, events in historic time astonishingly fuse with events beyond time; it is often impossible to define a distinction between the two. loc: 1413  

some sceptics pointed out that Jesus came from the northern district of Galilee, whereas the prophet Micah had foretold that the Jews’ Anointed One, the Messiah, would come from Bethlehem in Judaea, in the south.3 loc: 1429  

Implausibilities multiply: the Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod’s, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which would certainly have left traces around the Mediterranean. The story seems to embody a confusion with a well-attested Roman imperial census which certainly did happen, but in 6 CE, far too late for the birth of Jesus, and long remembered as a traumatic event because it was the first real taste of what direct Roman rule meant for Judaea.5 loc: 1437  

But there is much else to these stories, all reflecting the deepening conviction among followers of Christ that this particular birth had profound cosmic importance. loc: 1448  

Matthew raises an echo of Moses by sending Jesus and his parents in flight to Egypt from the murderous King Herod: loc: 1452  

Matthew and Luke provide two ancestor lists for Jesus which agree very little in the personnel involved and whose distinct patterns seem to have different preoccupations.6 loc: 1454  

Matthew’s list unconventionally includes descent through women, unlike Luke’s; a strange bunch those women are, all associated with eyebrow-raising sexual circumstances and also, Jesus’s mother, Mary, excepted, with non-Jews. The messages here seem to be that Jesus (and maybe also the circumstances of his birth) transcends petty conventions of behaviour in Jewish society, and also that even while he is a Jew, his destiny is confirmed as a universal one, not simply for the benefit of Jews.8 loc: 1458  

same thoughts run through the whole Gospel narrative which is given Matthew’s name: of all the Gospel writers, he is the most concerned to define how far and in what ways the Christian community for whom he is writing can depart from Jewish tradition while still observing its spirit. loc: 1461  

They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. loc: 1468  

Matthew describes the announcement of the miraculous birth as being made to Joseph, but Luke gives the experience to Mary, and it is striking that Christian devotion and Christian art have overwhelmingly concentrated on Luke’s account of an ‘Annunciation’ to Mary and have ignored Joseph’s equal revelation. It is a surprising reversal of the normal priority offered to men’s experience in the ancient world, and it reflects the early growth of a complex of Christian emotional and devotional needs attached to Mary and her role in Christ’s story. loc: 1473  

A proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit…Mary’s virginity centres on Matthew’s quotation from a Greek version of words of the prophet Isaiah in the Septuagint…This alters or refines the meaning of Isaiah’s original Hebrew: where the prophet had talked only of ‘a young woman’ conceiving and bearing a son, loc: 1482  

we can glimpse in the biblical text one view of Jesus as the coming Messiah from David’s line, or as another Moses, the ancient Deliverer. These perspectives were not lost, but voices emerged to acclaim Jesus as having a Father who was divinity itself, and these voices are now those overwhelmingly dominant in the New Testament. loc: 1486  

Jesus is portrayed as constantly referring to God as Father. He actually produces one of his most remarkable innovations by calling God ‘abba’, an Aramaic word equivalent to ‘Dad’, which had never been used to address God before in Jewish tradition,…this notion of an intimate Fatherhood between God and humanity is a basic layer of Jesus’s message: loc: 1492  

THE ADULT JESUS: A PUBLIC CAMPAIGN loc: 1509  

One date alone looks fairly secure: Luke’s Gospel carefully places the beginning of a parallel ministry by John ‘the Baptist’, said to be a cousin of Jesus, in the year 28-9 CE; Jesus himself underwent a baptism in the River Jordan at the hands of John.15 This immediately preceded Jesus’s own independent appearance on the public stage; Jesus’s campaign may have been something of a rival movement, given the vigorous assertions of Jesus’s superiority to John to be found in all the Gospels.16 loc: 1512  

The Gospels do not give a definite answer as to whether Jesus’s ministry lasted for one year (John) or three (Matthew, Mark and Luke), or where its main focus lay within the Holy Land. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke speak of a ministry spent mostly in Galilee in the north, with a final southward journey to Jerusalem; the evangelist John, by contrast, deals mostly with activity in the south, Judaea, focusing especially on the city and the Temple. loc: 1519  

there a good many wandering teachers like him at the time, but it may have been precisely the ideas he shared with his contemporaries and predecessors which were most significant at the time and first won a hearing through their familiarity. loc: 1527  

To a surprising degree, the Synoptic Gospels reveal distinctive quirks of speech in Jesus’s sayings which suggest an individual voice. One very common and very Semitic peculiarity, for instance, is found more than a hundred times in these three Gospels: Jesus has a trick of setting one proposition against an opposed proposition. So Mark has Jesus saying, ‘With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.’ loc: 1541  

This suggests an urgency to his message, a punchiness which would make each saying easy to remember and recite long after listeners had first heard it shouted in public.21 loc: 1548  

Another quirk is Jesus’s frequent and apparently unprecedented use of the emphatic Hebrew and Aramaic exclamation ‘Amen!’…in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions of the English Bible, it becomes ‘verily’.…it is intended to emphasize the uniquely personal authority of the speaker, and it may be contrasted significantly with the reported-speech construction of a phrase which had been much used in the Tanakh, ‘Thus says the Lord’. Jesus in the Gospels is his own authority. loc: 1555  

Along with this sense that Jesus has a prerogative to speak with greater power than that of the ancient prophets, one hears irony, indirectness in his voice, particularly in a mysterious phrase of his which continues to provoke debate among biblical scholars, ‘the Son of Man’. loc: 1558  

It echoes a use of a phrase, ‘One like a son of man’, in the Book of Daniel, a work about two centuries older than Jesus’s time, where the reference is to one who takes up an everlasting reign to replace the demonic kingdoms of the physical world.25 Therefore it points to a Jesus who saw himself and proclaimed himself as the Messiah whom Jews expected - but in a curious, oblique way. loc: 1567  

‘Son of Man’ may reflect in Greek a phrase in Aramaic (Jesus’s everyday language) meaning ‘someone like me’, sometimes with the sense that this meaning extends to the group who have the privilege of listening to what Jesus is saying - ‘people like us’.26 loc: 1572  

another distinctive and engaging feature of Jesus’s discourses, the miniature stories or ‘parables’ which illuminate aspects of his message. There is nothing like the parables in the writings of Jewish spiritual teachers (rabbis) before Jesus used them; loc: 1576  

many of Jesus’s parables would have had all the more impact because they drew on existing stories which ordinary people knew:…The overwhelming preoccupation in the parables, despite their various accretions after Jesus’s time, is a message about a coming kingdom which will overwhelm all the normal expectations of Israel and take its establishment figures by surprise. People must be watchful for this final event, which is inevitably going to catch them unawares: loc: 1592  

Much celebration and joy run through these stories, which tell of feasts and wedding banquets, yet also custom, common sense and even natural justice are at times ruthlessly ignored:…The coming kingdom will make up its own rules. loc: 1602  

These ‘Beatitudes’ have remained as a subversive tug at the sleeve for churchmen in the centuries during which they have had too much worldly comfort, an encouragement for the oppressed, and even a stimulus to many Christians to seek out deprivation and practise humility loc: 1608  

There is much punishing fire flickering round the preacher’s words. There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations. They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful self-regard or prudence. That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like. loc: 1614  

If we can assign any meaning to epiousios, it may point to the new time of the coming kingdom: there must be a new provision when God’s people are hungry in this new time - yet the provision for the morrow must come now, because the kingdom is about to arrive.37 loc: 1626   • Delete this highlight

Note: As in give us our epiouos bread Edit this note

So Jesus was convinced of his special mission to preach a message from God which centred on an imminent transformation of the world, yet he spoke of himself with deliberate irony and ambiguity, and used a delicate humour that is revealed in the content of some of his sayings. He spoke of his special place in a divine plan, looked forward to a last judgement in which he would play a leading part, yet also saw that the way to this final conclusion might result in suffering and death both for himself and for his followers. He made crowds laugh. He shocked or excited them with irreverent comments on authority; so he caricatured rival religious teachers ‘straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel’. He produced outrageous inversions of normality loc: 1639  

Still, Jesus was a Jew immersed in the traditions that constituted the identity of his fellow Jews. He is recorded as taking a cavalier attitude to the Jewish Law or obeying its demands in ways which seem capricious, loc: 1651  

Maybe the answer is that Jesus did not care a great deal about being consistent on the issue, given his concentration on the imminent coming of the kingdom, in which all laws would be made anew. loc: 1654  

but he cared a great deal about oaths, in particular about an agreement to enter marriage. In this respect Jesus was more hard line than regular Jewish practice embodied in the Law of Moses - loc: 1656  

absolute prohibition of divorce was one of his foundation principles, loc: 1658   • Delete this highlight

Note: Since Frank had a parting of the ways with his congregation over this, I wonder what his take on it is. Edit this note

CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION loc: 1661  

The death of Jesus became inextricably linked in the minds first of the witnesses, then of the later Church, with the lamb killed for a blood-soaked sacrifice in the Passover ceremonies.…Eucharist. That is still the everyday Greek word for ‘thanks’. loc: 1676  

These Passion narratives are probably the earliest continuous material in the Gospels, a set of stories first formulated for public recital in the various communities which compiled their own accounts of his life, sufferings and resurrection. loc: 1682  

His was not a theological but a political threat to the fragile stability of the region. Non-Jews killed a potential Jewish leader, as they had killed the Maccabean heroes long before. loc: 1688  

Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the story. So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities,…Matthew shifted blame for Jesus’s death (with satisfying drama, though without any legal force) to the Jewish crowds, who in his narrative roared out, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children!’45 loc: 1700  

Resurrection is not a matter which historians can authenticate; it is a different sort of truth, or statement about truth. It is the most troubling, difficult affirmation in Christianity, but over twenty centuries Christians have thought it central to their faith. Easter is the earliest Christian festival, and it was for its celebration that the Passion narratives were created by the first Christians. loc: 1715  

And the fact that Christianity’s Jesus is the resurrected Christ makes a vital point about the misfit between the Jesus whose teachings we have excavated and the Church which came after him. It mattered much less to the first Christ-followers after the Resurrection what Jesus had said than what he did and was doing now, loc: 1720  

Luke’s Gospel ends with one of the most apparently naturalistic-sounding and circumstantial of these encounters: a conversation between a stranger and two former disciples, Peter and Cleopas, on the road from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. It was only later, over a meal in Emmaus, that Peter and Cleopas recognized Jesus for who he was.49…the meal of recognition at Emmaus is transparently the Church’s breaking of bread and wine, echoing the Last Supper or Eucharist of the Passion narratives. loc: 1737  

Emmaus may not have been a real place near Jerusalem at all in first-century Judaea. Two centuries before, it certainly had been a real place: the site of the first victory of the Maccabean heroes over the enemies of Israel, where ‘all the Gentiles will know that there is one who redeems and saves Israel’.50 In terms of the Gospel story, Emmaus was beyond time, but it was the natural setting for the disciples to meet the one who had eclipsed the sufferings of the Maccabees in order to redeem the new Israel before the face of all people. loc: 1740  

Historians are never going to make sense of these reports, unless like some of those who first heard them they choose to regard them as simply ludicrous. Nevertheless they can hardly fail to note the extraordinary galvanizing energy of those who spread the story after their experience of Resurrection and Ascension, and they can reconstruct something of the resulting birth of the Christian Church, even if the story can never be more than fragmentary. Whether through some mass delusion, some colossal act of wishful thinking, or through witness to a power or force beyond any definition known to Western historical analysis, those who had known Jesus in life and had felt the shattering disappointment of his death proclaimed that he lived still, that he loved them still, and that he was to return to earth from the Heaven which he had now entered, to love and save from destruction all who acknowledged him as Lord.52 loc: 1748  

The problem is simple in its utter complexity: how can a human being be God?…how can God be involved in the unhygienic messiness of everyday life and remain God?…yet without dirt, where is the real humanity of Christ, which tears other humans away from despair and oblivion towards joy and life? loc: 1760  

NEW DIRECTIONS: PAUL OF TARSUS loc: 1775  

The Church knows them as ‘epistles’, from the Greek word epistolē, which reflects the character they have come to assume in Christian tradition as ‘commands’ or ‘commissions’, not simply as messages. loc: 1781  

The circumstances of this conversion as described in Acts are dramatic; it came in the wake of his watching and approving of the stoning to death in Jerusalem of Stephen, the first known martyr for Christ after Christ’s death, some time in the early 30s CE. loc: 1790  

Paul’s own account in his letter to the Churches in the Roman province of Galatia (in central Asia Minor) is more reticent. It merely says that God ‘was pleased to reveal his Son to me’,…this reference is coupled with the notice of a dramatic new direction for the proclamation of the good news: Paul claims that God had set him aside to preach Christ ‘among the Gentiles’ - that is, non-Jews. loc: 1797  

Paul’s journeys which we know about from Acts, some of which are also attested in his surviving letters, take him in an entirely opposite direction: the eastern Mediterranean, and finally to Rome, the scene of his death some time in the mid-60s CE. It was a momentous change, which in the long term was to turn Christianity from a faith of the Semitic East into something very different, in which the heirs of Greek and Latin civilization determined the way in which the Christ story was told and interpreted. loc: 1803  

In reality, Paul’s move towards the Gentile world may at first have been partial and cautious. loc: 1813  

Paul’s authentic letters take for granted a very detailed knowledge of Jewish tradition in their readers, loc: 1815  

Paul was helped by a particular feature of many synagogue communities in the Mediterranean world: in addition to those members of the synagogue who were identified as Jews, through birth and the physical mark of circumcision, there were groups of non-Jews who had consciously bought into the faith of Judaism.…‘God-reverers’ (theosebeis), loc: 1820  

His surviving writings are virtually empty of what the earthly Jesus had taught - teaching (in Aramaic) which would have naturally been passed on to him by ‘flesh and blood’, if he had consulted them - and the silence contrasts significantly with the fact that he is regularly prepared to quote the Tanakh. loc: 1831  

Jesus is Christ (the Anointed) because he has been chosen to fulfil God’s plan, and Lord because his place in God’s plan gives him eternal dominion and power.60…Paul tended in his letters to talk of Jesus as ‘Christ’ when he was making statements and as ‘Lord’ when he was pleading with his readers or ordering them to do something. loc: 1836  

Paul knew much in his previous belief system about obedience to the Law, and one senses him struggling with his inheritance of Law in ways that are never wholly coherent. loc: 1839  

one can read that the Law brings wrath and sin, but also that it is holy.62…this seeming incoherence may be explained by the completeness of his traumatic Damascus road experience: he had rejected what was good, his Jewish heritage, for something incomparably better - Christ. loc: 1846  

Adam, the first man, sinned so completely that no law had power to deal with the universal sin that resulted; neither he nor his descendants could be ‘righteoused’ through their own efforts, loc: 1850  

the core of Paul’s message was to point to Christ and our need for total faith in him; salvation to eternal life comes through Christ alone. loc: 1853  

Obedience is a theme to which Paul obsessively returns. loc: 1858  

Paul presented this Jesus as he had experienced him: a risen, transcendent figure whose earthly life was secondary to what happened as a result of his death. He pointed back to the catastrophe brought about by Adam’s disobedience, and then to Christ’s triumph over this catastrophe: ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’.66 loc: 1861  

The Church is distinguished wherever its particular congregations meet by a common meal, which Paul described as echoing and remembering actions of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.67 Everywhere the Church is united by baptism, a once-for-all ceremony of washing the believer with water. Nothing else is able to bring unity to the followers of Christ, loc: 1867  

‘For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit.’68 We are now hearing of a third party beside ‘God’ and ‘Christ’: the ‘Spirit’.…Paul and the communities to whom he was writing would no doubt have said that all he was doing was trying to express a reality which they had found in their midst. loc: 1877  

The power of the Spirit was like a volcano under the community, showing itself in forms ranging from such spectacular displays to the everyday. loc: 1880  

It has curiously little interest in the life and teaching of its founder, concentrating instead on the effect of his death and resurrection in God’s cosmic plan. The individual, living in Christ, is never his own person. Love, participation, indwelling bind all together: such relationships transcend the usual human bonds of marriage, family ties or social status, loc: 1888  

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND REVELATION loc: 1891  

He portrays from the outset a Jesus who, in the Gospel’s great opening hymn, is already fully identified with the pre-existing Word which was with God: John’s Gospel narrative is a progressive glorification of this figure, to the Cross and beyond. loc: 1898  

The Spirit of whom Paul speaks is also a constant presence in this Gospel, loc: 1905  

A strange poetic work known as Revelation now forms the last book of the New Testament, an open letter addressed to a number of named Church communities in what today is southern Turkey. It is likely to have been written in the time of the Emperor Domitian (81-96 CE) and to be the product of Christian fury at his brutal campaign to strengthen the cult of emperor worship. loc: 1909  

John the Divine is the only New Testament writer uninhibitedly and without qualification to use the provocative title of ‘king’ for Christ.…The early Christians were scared of what the Roman authorities might think if they started calling Christ a king; loc: 1919  

Revelation is the great exception: the one book of the New Testament which positively relishes the subversiveness of the Christian faith. loc: 1926  

Once more, Jesus is a figure of cosmic significance, the Lamb who at the end of worldly time sits upon the throne. loc: 1930  

Significantly, together with God the Almighty, the Lamb has replaced any need for a Temple in the city which is the New Jerusalem.75 loc: 1932  

The separate inspiration of much of Paul’s message (a matter which, as we have seen, he himself emphasized) was bound to bring tensions with the Jerusalem leadership, and in fact there were bitter clashes hinted at even in the emollient prose of the Book of Acts. A furious passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians reveals the real seriousness of the quarrel, as Paul accused his opponents, including Jesus’s disciple Peter, one of the original Twelve, of cowardice, inconsistency and hypocrisy.77 loc: 1948  

Questions of deep symbolism arose: should converts accept such features of Jewish life as circumcision, strict adherence to the Law of Moses and abstention from food defiled by association with pagan worship (that would include virtually all meat sold in the non-Jewish world)? loc: 1953  

THE JEWISH REVOLT AND THE END OF JERUSALEM loc: 1963  

The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans. loc: 1967  

The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle. loc: 1968  

After the revolt of 66-70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century. The Jewish-led Christ-followers regrouped in the town of Pella in the upper Jordan valley and maintained contact with other like-minded Jewish Christian communities in the Middle East.…their future was one of gradual decline. No longer did they have the prestige of a centre in the sacred city of Jerusalem. loc: 1981  

The Church of Paul, which had originally seemed the daughter of the Jerusalem Church, rejected the lineal heirs of the Jerusalem Church as imperfect Christians. Soon it regarded their ancient self-deprecating name of Ebionites (‘the poor’ in Hebrew: an echo of Jesus’s blessing on the poor in the Sermon on the Mount) as the description of a heretical sect. loc: 1983  

Like the Jewish Christ-followers, the surviving leaders of mainstream Judaism were forced to regroup away from the former capital and the Romans concentrated them on a former estate of the Herodian royal family at the town of Jamnia (Yavneh), near the coast.82 Here tradition says that this gathering was very influential in giving Judaism a unity of religious belief which it had not previously possessed; loc: 1990  

the Pharisee group which shaped the future of this ancient monotheistic faith, producing an ever-expanding volume of commentary on the Tanakh and a body of regulations to give a sense of precise boundaries to Jews in their everyday life. loc: 1994  

Temple sacrifice ended for ever; what was left was the first religious tradition which could have taken the phrase which later became so important to Muslims and called itself the People of the Book. loc: 1997  

it had been the Temple establishment of Sadducees, but the Pharisees come in for far more abuse recorded by the Gospel writers, often in the mouth of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus seems to have resembled the Pharisees in much of his teaching and outlook. When the Gospels were compiled in the last decades of the first century, the descendants of the Pharisees, the leaders at Jamnia, were a living force, unlike the Sadducees, and many Christian communities had become strongly opposed to them. loc: 2000  

The growing coherence in Judaism, the narrowing in variety of Jewish belief, meant that by the end of the first century CE a break between Christianity and Judaism was more and more likely: loc: 2006  

In everyday life, the Roman imperial authorities unwittingly encouraged the process of separation between Jews and Christians by imposing a punitive tax in place of the voluntary contributions which Jews had once paid to the Jerusalem Temple. loc: 2017  

Thanks to these developments, and to the energy of Paul’s work in reaching out to the non-Jewish world, the movement which had started as a Jewish sect decisively shifted away from its Palestinian home, and all the sacred writings which form the New Testament were written in Greek. The Christ revealed in the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, much more than in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a cosmic ruler and his followers must conquer the whole world. loc: 2027  

With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life-story, this very name ‘Christian’ embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the word has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. loc: 2041  

Topic: Chapter 4 Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300)

4 Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300) loc: 2063  

SHAPING THE CHURCH loc: 2064  

Jesus had said that ‘those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel’: that is, they deserve support from others.4 Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, loc: 2091  

Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home loc: 2095  

This set a significant pattern for the future: Christianity was not usually going to make a radical challenge to existing social distinctions. The reason was that Paul and his followers assumed that the world was going to come to an end soon and so there was not much point in trying to improve it by radical action. loc: 2110  

He made notably little reference in his letters to the ‘kingdom of God’, that concept of a radical turn to world history which had meant so much to Jesus and had accompanied his challenge to so many existing social conventions. Paul was a citizen of the Roman Empire, here and now, emphasizing without Jesus’s witty ambiguity that everyone must ‘be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.’ loc: 2115  

The balance he struck represented a tension between a wish to keep the gatherings of Christians exclusive and a wish to keep the new religion’s frontiers open in order to make more converts. This undercurrent of instability remained through the centuries during which the Church was identified with all society and has never wholly disappeared from Christian consciousness. loc: 2126  

It told house-slaves to compare their sufferings to the unjust sufferings of Christ, in order that they should bear injustice as Christ had done. That did not say much about the writer’s expectations that Christian slave owners would be better than any others, and it followed a strong command to ‘be subject to every human institution’. 14 loc: 2138  

there are plenty of signs that Christians began by giving women a newly active role and official functions in Church life, then gradually moved to a more conventional subordination to male authority.16 loc: 2148  

All three evangelists make women the first witnesses to the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus; this is despite the fact that in Jewish Law women could not be considered as valid witnesses. loc: 2151  

He [Paul] also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all.…he tells women to cover their heads when prophesying, yet elsewhere when addressing the same community in Corinth, he forbids women to speak in worship at all.19 loc: 2180  

hopes of Christ’s imminent return began to fade in the later first century and Christians began to realize that they must create structures which might have to last for a generation or more amid a world of non-believers. loc: 2184  

the ‘Pastoral Epistles’. What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. loc: 2191  

Now the various gradations of status and authority to be found in the world are to shape the way in which Christians conceive their faith. And there is an extra consideration, connected to the Pastoral Epistles’ insistence that Church leaders must be beyond reproach outside the community as well as inside it.25 The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization loc: 2202  

In just two respects are the first Christians recorded as having been consciously different from their neighbours. First, they were much more rigorous about matters of sex than the prevailing attitudes in the Roman Empire; they did not forget their founder’s fierce disapproval of divorce. loc: 2208  

Likewise, abortion and the abandonment of unwanted children were accepted as regrettable necessities in Roman society, but, like the Jews before them, Christians were insistent that these practices were completely unacceptable. loc: 2212  

Up to the end of the first century, it is virtually impossible to get any perspective on the first Christian Churches other than that of writings contained in the New Testament, however much we would like to have a clearer picture of why and how conversions took place. There is a silence of about six crucial decades, during which so many different spirals of development would have been taking place away from the teachings of the Messiah, who had apparently left no written record. loc: 2234  

there was a whole range of possibilities for the future shape of this new religion, and no certainty as to whether any single mainstream would emerge. loc: 2246  

Once the Christians expanded beyond Palestine, they were meeting cultures very different from that of Judaism, especially within the Graeco-Roman world. Many converts would be people with a decent Greek education; it was only natural for them to understand what was taught them by reference to the thought of Greek philosophers.…How could a Jewish carpenter’s son, who had died with a cry of agony on a gallows, really be the God who was without change or passions, and whose perfection demanded no division of his substance? loc: 2251  

ALTERNATIVE IDENTITIES: GNOSTICISM, MARCIONISM loc: 2260  

Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation. This suggests that gnostic beliefs were likely to emerge in places with a Jewish presence and gnostics were people who found the Jewish message hard to take loc: 2274  

anyone imbued with a Greek cast of enquiring mind might raise questions about Jewish insistence that God’s creation is good: if that is so, why is there so much suffering and misery in the world? Why is the human body such a decaying vessel, so vulnerable even amid the beauty of youth to disease and petty lusts? loc: 2277  

Platonic assumptions about the unreality of human life, or prevailing Stoic platitudes about the need to rise above everyday suffering, could conspire with dualism from the East to produce a plausible answer: what we experience with our physical senses is mere illusion, a pale reflection of spiritual reality. loc: 2279  

First, if the God of the Jews who created the material world said that he was the true and only God, he was either a fool or a liar. At best he can be described in Plato’s term as a ‘demiurge’ (see pp. 32-33), and beyond him there must be a First Cause of all that is real, the true God. Jesus Christ revealed the true God to humanity, so he can have nothing to do with the Creator God of the Jews. Knowledge of the true God is a way to contemplate the original harmony of the cosmos before the disaster represented by the creation of the physical world. loc: 2284  

If there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel - particularly human suffering. loc: 2291  

Mortal flesh must be mortified because it is despicable - or, on the contrary, the soul might be regarded as so independent of the body that the most wildly earthly excesses would not imperil its salvation.…the austere, ascetic strain in gnosticism is far more reliably attested than any licentiousness, loc: 2302  

One might have expected gnostic contempt for the flesh to lead gnostics to sacrifice it in martyrdom as did other Christians, but evidently they did not think the body worth sacrificing. Not only is there a total absence of stories of gnostic martyrs, but there is positive evidence that gnostics opposed martyrdom as a regrettable self-indulgence and were angry that some Christian leaders encouraged it. loc: 2309  

The gnostics included people of sophistication and learning - the complexity and frequent obscurity of their literature impressively demonstrated that - and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide. Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God. loc: 2320  

he [Marcion] came to the same conclusion as gnostics in saying that the created world must be a worthless sham and Jesus’s flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive - ‘Jewish myths’, in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus, which he would have attributed to the Apostle Paul.42 He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement,…his [Marcion] teachings had a widespread effect, and there is evidence that congregations with Marcionite beliefs survived until as late as the tenth century loc: 2342

CANON, CREED, MINISTRY, CATHOLICITY loc: 2348  

The Christianity which emerged in reaction to these two possibilities adopted the same strategy as Marcion: it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing at the same time in reaction to the disaster of Jerusalem’s fall. loc: 2353  

From an ordinary Greek adjective for ‘general’, ‘whole’ or ‘universal’, katholikos/ē, there developed a term of great resonance for Christianity, loc: 2356  

three main tools to build a ‘Catholic’ faith: developing an agreed list of authoritative sacred texts (a ‘canon’ of scripture, from the Greek for ‘straight rod’ or ‘rule’); forming creeds; embodying authority in ministers set aside for the purpose. loc: 2362  

If we seek one explanation of why ‘Catholic’ Christianity so successfully elbowed aside both the gnostic alternatives and the tidy-mindedness of Marcion, it is to its sacred literature that we should point: its formation of a text which still remains the anchor of Christian belief, and which is held in common throughout the many varieties of Christian Churches. loc: 2367  

It is likely that the first collection of biblical ‘New Testament’ books which would be familiar to modern Christians was made in the middle of the second century, but that is not the same as saying that it was universally accepted by Christians straight away.47 The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, loc: 2374  

in the second century these creeds took on a new aggressive tone in response to the growing diversity of Christian belief. loc: 2397  

credal statement set down by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons in a work of instruction written in Greek in the late second century…God the Father, uncreated, beyond grasp, invisible, one God the maker of all; this is the first and foremost article of our faith. But the second article is the Word of God, the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was shown forth by the prophets according to the design of their prophecy and according to the manner in which the Father disposed; and through Him were made all things whatsoever. He also, in the end of times . . . became a man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and bring to light life, and bring about the communion of God and man. And the third article is the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the patriarchs were taught about God . . . and who in the end of times has been poured forth in a new manner upon humanity over all the earth, renewing man to God.50 loc: 2401  

practically every clause in it hits at gnostic attitudes. loc: 2409  

Above all, there must be a universally recognized single authority in the Church able to take decisions: to choose sacred texts for canonical status or compare the content of local creeds in Churches for a uniform direction in teaching. loc: 2410  

By 200 CE there was a mainstream Catholic Church which took for granted the existence of a threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, loc: 2413  

It was not surprising that the Jerusalem Church had a single leading figure in the wake of the death of Jesus, since it was Jesus’s own brother, James. He seems to have presided over apostles; they included the remaining figures from the original Twelve but also numbered others awarded this description. The leadership in Jerusalem under James had a group of elders as well: the Greek is presbyteroi, which would descend into the English ‘priests’, as well into other terms which much later took on polemical overtones, ‘presbyters’ and ‘presbytery’. In addition to these, there was a group of seven deacons: the word is the ordinary Greek for servant, diakonos.51 So it is tempting to see in this the equivalent in embryo of the later grades of bishop, priest and deacon. loc: 2417  

The Church elsewhere had spread in more Hellenized settings mainly through the work of Paul and his sympathizers, and all sorts of patterns of ministry emerge from casual references in various epistles and in Acts. Talk of charismata, gifts of the Spirit, is frequent, and these gifts were not confined to the Apostles, posing problems in regulating them loc: 2430  

in the late-first-century Church: a mobile ministry included those known as apostles and prophets, the local ministry in particular places consisted of a grade known interchangeably as bishops or presbyters, together with a separate grade of deacons, who assisted in performing the Eucharist, the central Christian ritual act, and also in the day-to-day running of church affairs. It was perhaps not surprising that a mobile and a local ministry should sometimes come into conflict: loc: 2441  

two different ways of presenting authority handed down from the Apostles, and each form of minister might have their own charisma. loc: 2445  

Ultimately the mobile ministry disappeared from the mainstream Church, leaving the local ministry as the only accepted form. loc: 2449  

[Clement wrote to the church at Corinth in 100 CE after they expelled church leaders claiming that they were] endangering a God-given line of authority from the Apostles, who first preached the Gospel which they received directly from Jesus, himself ‘sent from God’. Break this link, said Clement, and the appointed worship of God is endangered; by implication, succession is the only way of making sure that doctrine remains the same in Corinth and in Rome and throughout the whole Church. loc: 2456

This is the first surviving formulation of an idea of apostolic succession in Christian ministry.…also the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church: a moment with much significance loc: 2461  

the elevation of one leading bishop figure above other presbyters was virtually complete by the end of the second century. loc: 2467  

One powerful force in this development was the prestige enjoyed in all parts of the Church by the seven letters written to various Churches and to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. They relate to his journey from Antioch to Rome following his arrest just after 100 CE and were written in the certain expectation (indeed joyful hope) that he would die as a martyr.54 loc: 2468  

he emphasized the reality of both Christ’s divinity and his humanity, which he saw best expressed in the Church’s continuing celebration of the Eucharist. But how could this doctrine be guaranteed? Ignatius pointed to what he saw as a standard of doctrine set by the beliefs affirmed by the Church in Rome, which he knew would be the city of his martyrdom;…He linked with this the role in each community of the bishop, who should be the one person in every place responsible for handing on the faith and guarding against deviation. The bishop, after all, presided at the Eucharist and should be the automatic source of authority: loc: 2475  

Soon, big churches had many presbyters under the bishop’s authority: deacons were the bishops’ assistants, occasionally themselves rising to be bishops, but never being made presbyters. Much later, the distinctive role of the deacon diminished, and late in the Roman Empire there were already examples of the diaconate being used as the first step in a successful clerical career through the order of presbyters, up to the rank of bishop, just like the various career grades in the Roman civil service. loc: 2494  

Amid these developments of a ‘Catholic’ episcopate in the second century, the episcopal leaders of certain cities stood out as especial figures of authority, what would later be called patriarchs: in the East the predictable centres of Antioch and Alexandria (equally predictably by this stage, not Jerusalem). In the West was Rome. loc: 2497  

Christ’s Apostle Peter, was later credited not only with having died there but also with having been the city’s first monarchical bishop.58…theology of the Latin West especially reflects Paul’s preoccupations, which had brought him into serious conflict with his fellow Apostle Peter loc: 2512  

Yet Peter has taken the limelight in Rome. 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. loc: 2516  

Some time in the 160s a shrine was built for Peter at the place of his burial, perhaps to commemorate a hundred years passing since his death.…its very existence in a public urban cemetery speaks of a community determined to stake its claim to an open existence in the capital. loc: 2521  

Even in the second century, the evidence suggests that Bishops of Rome were part of a team of presbyters who might also be considered as having the authority of bishops, in a diverse and loosely organized city Church, and what particular prestige and authority were enjoyed by the Church in Rome was a matter of its collective identity.62 loc: 2525  

The second-century Roman Church’s numbers were substantial, but still it formed a tiny proportion of the city’s population, and at that time and for some decades to come it revealed its origins as a community of immigrants by the fact that its language was not Latin but Greek. loc: 2528  

The switch to Latin in Christian Rome may have been made by one of the bishops at the end of the century, Victor (189-99).63 He may indeed have been the first monarchical bishop in Rome; he was one of that generation of Church leaders, like Irenaeus in Lyons and Demetrius in Alexandria, intent on creating a Church with a single source of episcopal authority and a single doctrinal standard which would be affirmed by other bishops elsewhere loc: 2535  

ending the long-standing custom of sending Eucharistic bread and wine which he had consecrated to a variety of Christian communities in the city - including Valentinian gnostics, Montanists and various exponents of Monarchian views on the Trinity (see pp. 145-6).64 This was in effect a punitive action; as such, it was a pioneering form of a favourite device in later centuries, excommunication loc: 2540  

The first surviving use of the title ‘papa’ in Rome occurs in the time of Bishop Marcellinus (296-304), loc: 2549  

There was, after all, no other Church in the West which could lay claim to the burial place of two Apostles and pilgrimage was beginning to draw Christians to Rome. loc: 2551  

It was a dispute in 256 between Bishop Stephen of Rome and the leading Bishop of North Africa, Cyprian of Carthage, that produced a Roman bishop’s first-known appeal to Matthew 16.18: Christ’s pronouncement to Peter that ‘on this rock I will build my Church’ might be seen as conferring particular authority on Peter’s presumed successor in Rome loc: 2559  

MONTANISM: PROPHECY RENEWED AND SUPPRESSED loc: 2563  

Asia Minor was, after all, the setting for the prophetic poem of John the Divine, and the hesitant reception of his Book of Revelation into the New Testament may reflect ecclesiastical worries about this recurrent theme of prophecy among Christians in Asia Minor. loc: 2568  

Montanus passionately proclaimed his enthusiasm for his new-found faith, but that extended (at a date uncertain, but probably around 165) into announcements that he had new revelations from the Holy Spirit to add to the Christian message. loc: 2569  

By what right did this man with no commission, in no apostolic succession, speak new truths of the faith and sweep crowds along with him in his excitement?…accompanied by female prophetesses who spoke in states of ecstasy.…their enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the Catholic Church’s general abandonment of Paul’s original conviction that the Lord Christ would soon be returning. loc: 2589  

there was little that could actually be described as heretical in what they said. The problem was one of authority.…The Church was settling on one model of authority in monarchical episcopacy and the threefold ministry; the Montanists placed against that the random gift of prophecy. loc: 2600  

‘If Montanism had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed, not under the superintendence of the church teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but usually of wild and excitable women.’71 loc: 2605  

The most dramatic effect of the fight against gnosticism was to halt Christianity’s march away from its Jewish roots, loc: 2609  

That left large questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church to Greek and Roman high culture, which in the work of a series of authors from the later years of the first century CE reached a new peak of literary creativity and self-conscious pride in the Greek cultural past, conventionally now called the ‘Second Sophistic’.…The Second Sophistic offered wisdom which owed nothing to the Christian revelation in scripture; was its wisdom then worthless? loc: 2625  

the Greek inheritance was indispensable to the Church. In their efforts to harness it to the Christian message, they can be said to have created or manufactured Christian teaching on a heroic scale, loc: 2627  

JUSTIN, IRENAEUS, TERTULLIAN loc: 2629  

Because Justin valued the whole of his spiritual exploration, he was concerned to explain his newly acquired Christian faith to those outside its boundaries in terms that they would understand; he was chief among a series of ‘Apologists’ who, in the second century, opened a dialogue with the culture around them in order to show that Christianity was superior to the elite wisdom of the age. loc: 2652  

For Justin, God the Father corresponded to Plato’s discussion of a supreme Being. Justin wanted to say with the mainstream Church against gnosticism that this supreme God had created the material world, and he tried to get over the problem of relating the two by seeing the Logos as a mediator between them. loc: 2658  

Irenaeus saw the vital centre of Catholic Christianity as the Eucharist, which could not be separated from the leadership role of the bishop who presided over it. He was determined to stress the importance of flesh and matter which he saw proclaimed in the Eucharist, and which gnostics rejected. Accordingly Irenaeus followed Justin in seeing God’s purpose unfold through all human history. The Old Testament was the central text on that history loc: 2674  

Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin.…Unlike Justin, he affected to despise the Classical tradition, loc: 2695  

Tertullian suggested that the human soul is transmitted by parents to their children and is therefore inescapably associated with continuing human sin: this doctrine of ‘traducianism’ underlay the pessimistic view of the human condition and its imprisonment in original sin loc: 2703  

He dealt combatively with a most perplexing problem which had evolved out of the Church’s sense, perceptible already in the writings of Paul, that the one God is experienced in three aspects, as Father, Son and Spirit - creator, redeemer and strengthener. But what was the relationship between them? Oneness in divinity was somehow reflected in threeness - indeed, one would need a word to express that idea of threeness. It is to be found for the first time in Tertullian’s writings, although probably he did not invent it: Trinitas. loc: 2708  

Monarchian models of God could take two forms. One, ‘Adoptionist Monarchianism’, explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the Father’s power rested in his human form.…other Monarchian approach was ‘modalist’, so called because it saw the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as corresponding merely to different aspects or modes of the same divine being, playing transitory parts in succession, loc: 2725  

many Christians associated one Greek word with Monarchian thinkers: homoousios, meaning ‘of one substance’, which could be applied to the intimate and direct relationship of Father and Son. loc: 2736  

ALEXANDRIAN THEOLOGIANS: CLEMENT AND ORIGEN loc: 2742  

Among Alexandrian theologians there developed the closest relationship with Greek philosophy which early Christianity achieved without entirely losing contact with the developing mainstream of the Church. loc: 2743  

he [Clement] regarded knowledge not merely as a useful intellectual tool of analysis for a Christian but as the door to a higher form of Christian spiritual life. loc: 2757

He emphasizes the Christian doctrine of creation and the positive value of our life on earth, presenting earthly existence as a journey towards knowledge of God, the result of hard work and moral progress. Salvation did not come through some random external gift, as many gnostics might assert; knowledge of God was found both in scripture and in such achievements of the human intellect as the writings of Aristotle and Plato: loc: 2763  

Clement was so concerned to stress the Christian progress in holiness that he saw each individual’s journey as continuing after physical death: ‘after he has reached the final ascent in the flesh, he still continues to advance’.85 He spoke of these further advances in afterlife in terms of the cosmic hierarchies which would have been familiar to gnostics, but he also spoke of this progress as a fiery purging - not the fires of Hell, but (borrowing a concept from Stoicism) a fire of wisdom.86 loc: 2767

Note: Becomes the idea of Purgatory Edit this note

Since Clement made so central the idea of moral progress, he wrote much about the way in which the Christian life should be lived on a day-to-day basis; he was one of the earliest Christian writers on what would now be called moral theology.…In defending a Christian’s responsible stewardship of riches, he provided an extended framework for Christian views of money and possessions for centuries to come. loc: 2779  

Emphatically Clement did not base justifications for marriage on romantic love, but on the necessity for procreating children: he was capable of saying ‘to have sex for any other purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature’. loc: 2785  

he [Origen] exhibited interestingly different talents. As a biblical scholar, he had no previous Christian rival. He set standards and directions for the giant task which was already occupying the Church, of redirecting the Tanakh to illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan: creating the text of the Bible as Christians now know it. His biblical commentaries became foundational for later understanding of the Christian sacred texts.91 loc: 2804

when he read the Bible, he shared Greek or Hellenistic Jewish scepticism that some parts of it bore much significant literal meaning.…such things were true, because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth, but they should not be read as if they were historical events,…Origen followed Clement in relishing the use of an ‘allegorical’ method of understanding the meaning of literary texts, loc: 2837  

Allegorical approaches to scripture proved very influential throughout Christianity, because they were hugely useful in allowing Christians to think new thoughts, or to adapt very old thoughts into their faith which derived from sources beyond the obvious meaning of their Old and New Testaments. loc: 2842  

the Syrian city of Antioch was home to theologians who were inclined to read the Bible as a literal historical record. The contrast in approach between Alexandria and Antioch, not merely to the Bible but to a whole range of theological issues, loc: 2846  

Particularly in his book entitled On First Principles, one of the first attempts at a universal summary of a single Christian tradition, he grappled with the old Platonic problem of how a passionless, indivisible, changeless supreme God communicates with this transitory world. For Origen as for Justin, the bridge was the Logos, and like Justin Origen could be quite bold in terming the Logos ‘a second God’, even tending towards making this Logos-figure subordinate to or on a lower level than the supreme God, loc: 2849  

He says that God created inferior spirits with free will and that they had abused this gift, following the example of a ringleader - Satan. The degree of their fall then determined which part of the cosmic order they occupied, from angels through humankind to demons. It is thus our duty to use our free will to remedy the mistake which we had made in this fall loc: 2859  

Thus our free will also has value, because it is seen most perfectly in Christ, and it is a gift for us to use properly. The whole scheme was intended to affirm the majesty of God, as Plato and Paul had done, but also to affirm the dignity of humankind. loc: 2869  

Since the first fall was universal, so all, including Satan himself, have the chance to work back towards God’s original purpose. All will be saved, since all come from God.99 loc: 2873  

the Church in both East and West turned its back on Origen’s vision of a universal salvation. Such a notion was indeed hard to square with some of the Gospels’ records of Jesus talking of final separation between sheep and goats. By rejecting it, Christianity was committing itself to the idea that God has made eternal choices, separating all people into the saved and the damned, loc: 2876  

Topic: Chapter 5 The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300)

5 The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300) loc: 2886   

THE CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE (100-200) loc: 2887   

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. loc: 2900   

they seemed actively to be aiming for total monopoly of the religious market.2 Greek-speaking Christians, like Jews before them, called all non-Christians who were not Jews ‘Hellenes’, a word to which a sneer was attached, but it was probably during the third century that Western Latin-speaking Christians developed their own contemptuous term for this same category: pagani. The word means ‘country folk’, and the usual explanation is that urban Christians looked down on rural folk who stuck like backwoodsmen to traditional cults. loc: 2903   

made them a potential force for disruption in Roman life. Indeed, the language they used in their enthusiasm for their saviour seems almost to be borrowed from the language which the imperial cult was developing in the lifetime of Jesus.…For the authorities, one feature of the Christians’ exclusivity was particularly alarming: their frequently negative attitude to military service. loc: 2913   

there is very little indication that early Christians continued as flamboyant public proclaimers of the Gospel, unless they were cornered in time of persecution. loc: 2939   

For Christians, such separation was inevitable, given their sense of the falsity of all other religions: ancient life was saturated with observances of traditional religion, and to play any part in ordinary life was to risk pollution, particularly in public office. loc: 2941   

with remarkable consistency, they recorded their sacred writings not in the conventional form of the scroll, like their Jewish predecessors and like everyone else in the ancient world, but in gatherings of sheets of parchment or paper in the form of our modern book (the technical Latin name is codex, loc: 2950   

Christians jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated.…As a result, these ceremonies were thoroughly misunderstood by intelligent and sensitive Roman observers. There arose reports of incest from their talk of love-feasts, of cannibalism from the language of eating and drinking body and blood. loc: 2969   

the first Christians in cities had usually begun proclaiming their ‘good news’ within the Jewish communities, and when they did so, they often provoked violence from angry Jews. loc: 2977   

Christians looked after their poor - that was after all one of the main duties of one of their three orders of ministry, the deacons - and they provided a decent burial for their members, a matter of great significance in the ancient world. It may be that the first official status for a Christian Church community was registration as a burial club: loc: 2984   

The Christian sense of certainty in belief was especially concentrated in their celebration of constancy in suffering, even to death.…there has survived an intense celebration of martyrdom. The first people whom Christians recognized as saints (that is, people with a sure prospect of Heaven) were victims of persecution who died in agony rather than deny their Saviour, who had died for them in agony on the Cross. Such a death, if suffered in the right spirit (not an easy matter to judge), guarantees entry into Heaven.…The necessary ability was to die bravely and with dignity, turning the agony and humiliation into shame and instruction for the spectators. loc: 3012   

In counterpoint to the Church’s pronounced drive towards conformity with society’s often perfectly reasonable expectations, which we have noted as such a characteristic feature of the later literature in the New Testament (see pp. 114-18), Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card.…‘We must obey God rather than men.’ loc: 3053   

More often than such incidents of dramatic intensity as Perpetua’s sufferings, persecution petered out rather inconclusively, as the Roman authorities felt that they had better things to do than to try and wipe out a group of troublesome fanatics. loc: 3057   

end of the second century, this random response began to change because of the sheer visibility of Christianity around the empire. By then, it had established itself throughout the Mediterranean world and into the Middle East. It is impossible to estimate the numbers of converts involved; Pliny’s experience in Bithynia would suggest that in Asia Minor at least, right at the beginning of the second century, Christians could form an economically significant part of the population. loc: 3069   

Beyond Asia Minor, Christian communities were probably quite small, particularly in the West outside Rome, and even there their numbers were dwarfed by the immense scale of the city. What was impressive, and increasingly noticed by non-Christians, was not so much the numbers of any one community but the geographical spread of the Church throughout the empire and beyond, and its sense of community. loc: 3076   

The genuineness of such claims [The claim of the bishops of large cities to succession from an apostle] is less important than the witness they give to the way in which apostolic succession had now established itself as a vital idea in the thinking of the Church, and to the self-confidence which these communities could feel in the ownership of a common tradition which involved many others. loc: 3088

Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment, an establishment which had never felt thus threatened by the teeming ancient cults of the provinces, or even by Judaism. loc: 3095   

Was it really trying to create a new citizenship for its own purposes, to create an empire within an empire? loc: 3098   

Yet if Christian belief was stupid, it was particularly dangerous because of its worldwide coherence: it was a conspiracy, and one which Celsus saw as especially aimed at impressionable young people. The result of Christian propaganda would be to leave the emperor defenceless, ‘while earthly things would come into the power of the most lawless and savage barbarians.’24 loc: 3106   

THIRD-CENTURY IMPERIAL CRISIS loc: 3109   

from Septimius’s death at York in 211 to Diocletian’s seizure of supreme power in 284, hardly a single Roman emperor died a natural death. It was a terrible time for the empire: loc: 3129   

short-lived Severan dynasty had been based on a military coup d’état and so were most of the succeeding regimes well into the fourth century. Such emperors could not appeal to any traditional legitimacy and were therefore increasingly dependent of the goodwill of the army. loc: 3132   

The army’s needs, both in the constant frontier wars and in equally bitter civil wars, became all-important: to pay for the soldiers, taxation soared, and many people fled their towns and villages,…Misery was increased by rampant inflation, caused by reckless imperial currency debasement, and many parts of society reverted to a barter economy as a result. loc: 3137   

price of this survival was that imperial government became the ancient equivalent of a police state.…ruin for the delicate balance of city life which had been the basis of Classical civilization since the great days of the Greek poleis.…The old spirit of civic solidarity had withered.28 loc: 3149   

Severans set a significant pattern, bolstering their dubious regime by encouraging the identification of different territorial gods as facets of one supreme God, then identifying themselves with this single figure: loc: 3154   

The third century has been seen as an ‘age of anxiety’, when people were driven to find comfort in religion.31 loc: 3158   

surviving writings of the literate elites do show a new interest in personal religion, remote from the traditionalist respect for the old gods and the cultured cynicism loc: 3159   

The worship of the sun became steadily more dominant, a natural universal symbol to choose in the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean. loc: 3161   

Intelligent people were now regarding it as respectable to take an interest in the sort of wonder-working which Philostratus described Apollonius as practising. They were also increasingly drawn to forms of philosophy which wore a religious and even magical aspect. loc: 3178   

Now the intellectual fashion was for Neoplatonism,…He [Plotinus] spoke in a trinitarian fashion of a divine nature consisting of an ultimate One, of Intelligence and of the Soul. The first represented absolute perfection, the second was an image of the first but was capable of being known by our inferior senses, and the third was a spirit which infused the world and was therefore capable of being diverse, in contrast to the perfection of the One and of Intelligence.…it was the task of the individual soul by ecstatic contemplation of the divine to restore the harmony lost in the world, an ecstasy so rare that Plotinus himself admitted to achieving it only four times in his life. loc: 3190   

Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new ‘Manichaean’ cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world’s suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil. loc: 3202   

Mani’s teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.36 Christians in the eastern Mediterranean in particular found his teachings as fascinating as previously they had the ideas of gnostic teachers,…No wonder the episcopal Christian Church loathed the Manichees so much and sought to eliminate them as competitors once it got the chance. loc: 3219   

FROM PERSECUTION TO PERSECUTION (250-300) loc: 3222   

Celsus had made it clear that it was now impossible for the Roman authorities to ignore Christianity. By the end of the second century, this religion from an obscure eastern province was beginning to find a presence even in the imperial palace. loc: 3223   

Christians were torn between their traditional exclusivity and a strong desire to please the powerful (even when the powerful offended Christian prejudices against graven images by sculpting Christ), while prominent Romans were caught between interest in and suspicion of Christian intentions. loc: 3234   

in the mid-third century, Christian subjects of the Roman emperor found themselves persecuted for the first time on an empire-wide scale on imperial initiative.…the situation came to a head in the 240s, which historically aware Romans would realize marked a thousand years from the foundation of the city of Rome. loc: 3242   

Trajan Decius, an energetic senator and provincial governor who seized power as emperor in 249, felt this keenly. He attributed the empire’s troubles on the morrow of its thousandth year squarely to the anger of the old gods that their sacrifices were being neglected - as we have seen (see pp. 167-8), he was right. For Decius the solution was simple: enforce sacrifices on every citizen, man, woman and child, or at least the head of a household in the name of all its members - a radical intensification of a traditional practice whereby emperors ordered every community to offer sacrifices on their accession.…Those who sacrificed were issued with certificates of proof,…The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way. loc: 3256   

The bishops’ authority was at stake. Some bishops had followed the Lord’s command recorded in John’s Gospel to suffer martyrdom bravely and had been killed (including the Bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome). Others had followed the Lord’s precisely contradictory advice to be found in Matthew’s Gospel to flee from city to city; loc: 3261   

Those who had fled were likely to come in for criticism from those who had stayed and suffered for their faith; from the Roman technical legal term for someone who pleads guilty as accused in court, these steadfast Christians were termed ‘confessors’. Confessors provided the troubled Church with an alternative sort of authority based on their sufferings, particularly when arguments began about how and how much to forgive those Christians who had given way to imperial orders - the so-called ‘lapsed’.…Many of the lapsed flocked to the confessors to gain pardon and re-entry to the Church, and the bishops did not like this at all. loc: 3268   

He [Cyprian] came to see authority for forgiveness of sins as vested in the bishop and he stressed that the bishop was the focus for unity in the whole Catholic Church, a successor of the Apostles in every diocese. loc: 3272

When many of their sympathizers decided that the division had gone too far, and the newly baptized applied to rejoin the Catholic Church in communion with Cyprian and Cornelius, Carthage and Rome were faced with the problem of deciding the terms. Was Novatianist baptism valid? Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome’s growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. loc: 3278   

Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence. loc: 3283   

Comparative peace then descended on the Church for several decades, and it is likely that the steady expansion of Christian numbers was one significant factor in the decline of traditional religious institutions during that period loc: 3288   

Nevertheless there followed the most serious bout of persecution yet, designed to wipe out Christianity in the empire, led by the reforming Emperor Diocletian.…303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy. Churches were torn down, sacrifices ordered and Christian sacred texts confiscated.…it was far more savage than most previous assaults on Christianity; nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.47 loc: 3303   

KINGS AND CHRISTIANS: SYRIA, ARMENIA loc: 3306   

This was a moment of dire danger for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Anyone capable of taking a wide view over the Mediterranean world in 303 would have been justified in concluding that it represented a final set-piece conflict between the traditional alliance of Graeco-Roman religion and politics and an organization which had made an unsuccessful bid to transform the empire and was now suffering the consequences. loc: 3307   

Even at the height of Roman success in spreading its power beyond the Euphrates in the second century CE, much of the Syrian region was only very superficially part of the Graeco-Roman world. Beyond the dignified Classical architecture of government buildings and the polite-ness of Hellenized city elites who did their best to ape the glory days of Athens, Latin and Greek would fade from the ear and the babble of voices in the street was dominated by some variant of the language which Jesus had spoken: Aramaic. loc: 3329   

It was not surprising that Syriac Christians continued to have intimate ties with Judaism.…the Syriac Church continued to have a much more Jewish character than elsewhere.50 loc: 3344   

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, loc: 3363   

The Romans conquered Osrhoene and made it part of the empire in the 240s, but before that its kings had let Christianity flourish. Later Syrian Christians celebrated this in the legend of King Abgar V of Osrhoene, who back in the first century was supposed to have received a portrait of Jesus Christ from the Saviour himself loc: 3368   

remedied an embarrassing deficiency in the story of early Christianity, a lack of an intimate connection with any monarchy. loc: 3373   

Under his Latin name Lucius, King in Britium, the Latin name for the fortress-hill looming over the city of Edessa, Abgar became by creative misunderstanding King Lucius of Britannia, welcoming early Christian missionaries to what would become England’s green and pleasant land.…the story became much beloved by early English Protestants when they were looking for an origin for the English Church which did not involve the annoying intervention of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission from Pope Gregory I loc: 3385   

At the same time as generations of bishops and scholars from Ignatius to Origen were shaping Christian belief within the imperial Catholic Church, individual voices were emerging in Syriac Christianity which frequently earned suspicion and condemnation from neighbours to the west. loc: 3396   

This highlights one of the most significant features of Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant. loc: 3426   

little hostility to this new religion, but there was a significant shift with the founding of the Sassanian Empire in the 220s; the first restored shah, Ardashir, was the grandson of a high priest of the Zoroastrian faith and a Zoroastrian restoration became a keynote of the new empire’s drive to restore Iranian tradition.71 loc: 3466   

The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being, in which the world created by the ‘Wise Lord’ (Ahura Mazda) was the forum for a struggle between the creator and an uncreated ‘Evil Spirit’ (Ahriman). The Zoroastrians’ experience of the world was therefore shot through with divinity; Zoroastrians made animal sacrifices to Ahura Mazda and paid reverence to fire. loc: 3472   

By around 290 there was a bishop based in the Sassanian capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, very near the modern Baghdad, whose successors increasingly took on the role of presiding bishop in the East beyond the Roman frontier. loc: 3481   

Sassanians could easily treat both groups as an alien threat to their rule. That tension became acute after Constantine established his alliance with Christian bishops at the beginning of the fourth century. Now it was easy for successive shahs to see Christianity as a fifth column for Rome.…provoked Shah Shapur II to a massacre of the bishop and a hundred of his clergy. The Shah’s anger and fear persisted in a persecution whose atrocities outdid anything that the Romans had achieved loc: 3490   

Trdat, known to the Romans as Tiridates, became king of Armenia in the 280s or 290s with the support of the Emperor Diocletian, and at first he followed Diocletian’s increasingly hostile policies towards Christianity. In the conversion story, it was after suffering acute mental disorder that the new king turned to Gregory for counsel, having previously subjected him to savage torture. The King then ordered his people, including the priesthood of the old religion, to convert en masse to Christianity,…it did represent the beginning of a passionate melding of Christianity and Armenian identity. loc: 3512   

Topic: Chapter 6 The Imperial Church (300-451)

Chapter 6 The Imperial Church (300-451) loc: 3532

CONSTANTINE AND THE GOD OF BATTLES loc: 3534

[Eusebius] revising his previous positive account of Licinius, he now had an excuse to portray Constantine’s former colleague as the last great enemy of the Christian faith in the tradition of Valerian and Diocletian.3 loc: 3551   • Delete this highlight

Most obviously, and for reasons which will probably remain hidden from us, the Emperor associated the Christian God with the military successes which had destroyed all his rivals, from Maxentius to Licinius. loc: 3569

The Emperor favoured Christians in senior positions and went as far as being baptized just before his death. loc: 3587

Traditionalists in Italy would have been pleased by Constantine building a new temple dedicated to the imperial cult, but the lion’s share of imperial patronage was now going to the Christians, and at the same time many temples were being stripped of precious metals at imperial command.8 loc: 3590

Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, loc: 3606

This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. loc: 3608

Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of ‘stational’ visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14 loc: 3616

sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. loc: 3627

the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter-century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena. loc: 3630

It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination. loc: 3635

Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.20 loc: 3651

Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection. loc: 3656

Christianity was becoming the religion of the powerful and it was entering what might be seen as an increasingly cosy alliance with high society. Power in the Graeco-Roman world lay in cities. Christians had acknowledged this by making them their own centres of power loc: 3669

Even in the second century, long before the alliance with Constantine, the Apologists and Logos-theologians were witnessing to Christian willingness to express itself in the terms of conventional Classical culture loc: 3674

The historian Eusebius of Caesarea so identified Constantine’s purposes with God’s purposes that he saw the Roman Empire as the culmination of history, the final stage before the end of the world. loc: 3679

imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its arch-enemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west, loc: 3684

bishops were becoming more like official magistrates, because their Church was being embraced by the power of the empire. loc: 3697

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, loc: 3699

churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration. The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a basilica. loc: 3703

The first Christian innovation was, wherever possible, to ‘orient’ the building: that is, to lay out its long axis west to east, with an apsidal end at the east to contain the eucharistic table or altar with the bishop’s chair behind it. loc: 3712

Second, instead of an entrance in a long side wall, the west gable of a Christian basilica now housed the entrance. So those coming into the building had their gaze directed throughout its length, both to the bishop’s chair and to the altar in front of it, which increasingly frequently contained or stood over the remains of some Christian martyr from the heroic era of persecution. loc: 3716

The purpose of this replanning was to turn the basilica into a pathway towards all that was most holy and authoritative in Christian life: the pure worship of God. loc: 3719

In the great services of the Church’s year, we would also see the living representative of God on earth, the bishop sitting in his chair, flanked by his clergy. This was a model of the Court of Heaven; and naturally everyone at the time would expect splendour at a Court. It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. loc: 3732

The Cross which was now becoming universally familiar as a visual symbol of Jerusalem, of crucifixion and resurrection, was never far from the portraits of the imperious Christ staring down from the walls on his servants celebrating below. loc: 3740

like the imperial Court, some people must be excluded from the festivities because they were not authorized to enter. Those who had not fulfilled the requirements for baptism and were still under instruction (catechēsis) were the ‘catechumens’. They were dismissed before the Eucharist began and restricted to the entrance area of the church, which often developed as a separate chamber at the west end of the basilican building. loc: 3741

From early days, the time of anxiety and tragedy which led up to the Resurrection was marked out by abstinence and vigil. By a natural progression of ideas, this was linked to the story in the Synoptic Gospels that Christ had retreated from his active life and ministry into the desert for forty days and nights. It was the perfect time of the liturgical year for catechumens to spend a last rigorous preparation before their triumphal reception into the Church during the celebration of Easter. loc: 3746

Christ’s birth and the celebration of the Christ Child’s adoration by non-Jewish astrologers (his ‘showing forth’ or ‘Epiphany’) came over the next centuries also to be observed with a similar introductory period of fasting and austerity, during which the faithful could act out their longing for the Saviour’s arrival or ‘Advent’. That forty-day season would make all the more joyful the Christmas and Epiphany festivals at the darkest time of the calendar, when the days were at their shortest, as the release came at last from the time of preparation. loc: 3751

THE BEGINNINGS OF MONASTICISM loc: 3755

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. loc: 3759

All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization. loc: 3774

At the root of this quarrel, which resulted in Hippolytus severing his links with the mainstream Church, was the issue of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners. loc: 3782

Underlining the uneasy relationship between monasticism and the mainstream Church, its origins are in the lands from which gnostic Christianity had also emerged: the eastern border-lands of the Roman Empire in Syria, and in Egypt. Moreover, the first moves to founding monastic communities were made at much the same time as the emergence of that new rival to Christianity, Manichaeism, with its ethos of despising physical flesh. loc: 3790

The testimonies in this work and in Tatian’s writings to the emergence of an ascetic (world-denying) impulse come at much the same time as the first evidence of organized celibate life inside the mainstream Church. loc: 3803

Groups of enthusiasts called Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant vowed themselves to poverty and chastity, but they avoided any taint of gnostic separation by devoting themselves to a life of service to other Christians under the direction of the local bishop. loc: 3805

Egypt was peculiarly suited to a Christian withdrawal from the world because of its distinctive geography: loc: 3809

It was here towards the end of the third century that the monastic movement first securely tied itself into the developed Church of the bishops and left a continuous history in conventional Christian sources, loc: 3811

Antony was already seeking out in fascination individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had taken to a solitary life or practised an ascetic discipline. 32 Eventually his desire to live a Christian life out of touch with anyone else led him into the desert or wilderness: from the Greek for wilderness, eremos, comes the word ‘hermit’. loc: 3818

Diocletian’s persecution of Christians and the sheer burden of taxation in ordinary society were powerful incentives to flee into the wilderness. As persecution ceased, not everyone wanted to go to such an extreme. So the community life already in existence in Syria found its parallel in Egypt, where groups of people withdrew from the world in the middle of the world, founding what were in effect specialized new villages in the fertile river zone: the first monasteries. loc: 3822

Life in the army was self-selecting and communal, with clear boundaries and conventions, and it may be that the ex-soldier Pachomius drew on that experience when he devised a simple set of common rules for hermits to preserve their solitude while becoming members of a common group living together. loc: 3826

the Greek/Latin monachos/ monachus means a single, special or solitary person, but a truly solitary way of life is not the most common form of monasticism. loc: 3838

the most ‘orthodox’ of hermits, simply by his style of life, denied the whole basis on which the Church had come to be organized, the eucharistic community presided over by the bishop. loc: 3846

As it happened, Antony amply proved himself in the eyes of the Church authorities, first by leaving his isolation during Diocletian’s persecution to comfort suffering Christians in Alexandria. loc: 3852

If anything bonded monasticism into the episcopally ordered Church, it was this pioneering hagiography (‘saint-writing’) from one of the most powerful bishops of the fourth century. It also established Egyptian monasticism in its image of desert solitude,…to a large extent a fabrication. loc: 3871

Like the ascetics of Syria, they would know of the terrible continuing sufferings of Christians in the fourth-century Sassanian Empire, and they would also be uncomfortably aware that such suffering was no longer available in the Roman Empire. In default of any more martyrdoms provided by Roman imperial power, they martyred their bodies themselves, and thus they annexed the esteem which martyrs had already gained among the Christian faithful.…quite conscious competition in this between Egyptians and Syrians, loc: 3881

During the fourth century, Egyptian hermits and monks became famous for their self-denial, vying like athletes in such exercises for God’s glory as standing day and night, or eating no cooked food for years on end.42 This spirit was equalled in Palestine and Syria, where monks and hermits performed terrifying feats of endurance and punishment of their worldly bodies by squeezing into small spaces or living in filth. loc: 3882

in the fifth century that there evolved a particular form of sacred self-ridicule or critique of society’s conventions: the tradition of the Holy Fool. It was a specialized form of denying the world.…The Holy Fool was destined to have a long history in the Orthodox tradition (although for some reason the Serbs never took to him). His extrovert craziness is an interesting counterpoint or safety valve to the ethos of prayerful silence and traditional solemnity which is so much part of Orthodox identity. loc: 3902

One of the most extraordinary practices adopted by some ascetics in Syria was to spend years on end exposed on top of a specially built stone column, living on a wicker platform which resembled the basket of a modern hot-air balloon.…They were like living ladders to Heaven, and even if hermits, they were far from remote. St Simeon himself had chosen one of the most elevated sites in his portion of northern Syria next to a major road, dominating the view for scores of miles, and preaching twice a day.46 Stylites often became major players in Church politics, shouting down their theological pronouncements from their little elevated balconies to the expectant crowds below, or giving personalized advice to those favoured enough to climb the ladder and join them on their platform. loc: 3915

It is plausible that one of the most important symbols of Islam, the minaret, was inspired by the sight of the later representatives of these Syrian Christian holy men summoning the faithful to worship God from their pillars. loc: 3924

he [Basil] was one of the first to set a pattern which became a norm in the Eastern Churches (see p. 437): he was first a monk, but was then chosen as bishop of his native Caesarea in Cappadocia, the modern Kayseri in Turkey. Basil, then, can be given much of the credit for uniting the charisma of monk and bishop, one of the potential problems for the fourth-century Church. loc: 3931 

He [Evagrius] and Basil were among the first monks to turn to writing alongside the physical struggles through which ascetics built up their spiritual life, yet the writings of Evagrius illustrate once more how uncomfortably the monastic movement might sit within the structures of the Christian Church. loc: 3941 

What made Evagrius’s ideas particularly suspect later was his distinctive pronouncement that the highest level of contemplation could produce no image or form when it reached to the divine, in order that a true union with God could take place: loc: 3945

Like so many others, he started on a road of inner exploration: a pattern in which the ascetic faced struggles and torments, to arrive at a state of serenity (apatheia) and then a final state achieved by the true master of the spirit, for which Evagrius was not afraid to use the resonant word gnosis. In all this Evagrius pointed, like a physician prescribing a programme of exercise, to an essential frame for spiritual progress: a rhythm of each day in structured monastic life, the orderly recital from the Psalms of David followed by a short time of silent prayer (in his case, a hundred times a day), and meditation on the Bible, which provided the seedbed in which prayer could grow. He was a strong believer in the human ability to receive God’s generosity and mercy and grow in grace: loc: 3953

CONSTANTINE, ARIUS AND THE ONE GOD (306-25) loc: 3966

Very quickly the Emperor Constantine I learned to his cost that Christians were inclined to imperil the unity which their religion proclaimed. The first instance of this came as a result of the Great Persecution: renewed quarrels about how to heal the wounds to the Church’s self-esteem. loc: 3967

Constantine’s interventions in this intractable dispute have a remarkably personal quality,…Anything which challenged the unity of the Church was likely to offend the supreme One God, and that might end his run of favour to the Emperor. loc: 3982

he adapted the North African Church’s well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops, with the difference that now for the first time they were gathered from right across the Mediterranean. loc: 3986

in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church’s first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors.…split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African loc: 3996

over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. loc: 3998

throughout the rest of the long history of the Catholic Church and beyond, the principle persisted that its bishops had a power and jurisdiction independent of the emperors.…the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church, its fortunes linked to those of emperors who commanded armies, loc: 4002

An austere and talented priest there called Arius was concerned to make his presentation of the Christian faith intellectually respectable to his contemporaries. To achieve this, he would have to wrestle with the old Platonic problem of the nature of God. If God is eternal and unknowable as Plato pictured him, Jesus Christ cannot be in the same sense God, since we know of him and of his deeds through the Gospels. This means, since the supreme God is one, that Christ must in some respect come after and be other than the Father, even if we accept that he was created or begotten before all worlds.…Moreover, since the Father is indivisible, he cannot have created the Son out of himself; if the Son was created before all things, it would therefore logically follow that he was created out of nothing. loc: 4012

Here, then, was Arius’s Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. loc: 4014

The Bishop of Nicomedia was in a powerful position to rally support for Arius, so the dispute began overtaking the entire Church in the eastern Mediterranean. loc: 4026

He [Constantine] chose the city of Nicaea (now the pleasant lakeside town of Iznik, still contained in its grand imperial walls), conveniently near his headquarters at Nicomedia. He told the delegates that they would enjoy the climate and also, with a hint of menace, that he intended to ‘be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done’: the first time in Christian history that this had happened. Some think that he actually presided at the council. It was he, probably on the recommendation of his ecclesiastical adviser, a Spanish bishop, Hosius or Ossius of Cordova, who proposed a most significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council’s agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was ‘of one substance’ (homoousios) with the Father. Faced with the awe-inspiring presence of the emperor of the known world, there could be little opposition to this: loc: 4033   • Delete this highlight

Nicaea has always been regarded as one of the milestones in the history of the Church, and reckoned as the first council to be styled ‘general’ or ‘oecumenical’.59 loc: 4045

COUNCILS AND DISSIDENTS FROM NICAEA TO CHALCEDON loc: 4047

There were problems with the word homoousios (the Homoousion). To begin with, and most troublingly, it was not a word used in the Bible. Second, it had a history, which we have already touched on when discussing the Monarchian disputes…The campaign to get rid of the Homoousion from Christian credal statements split the Church in the empire for another half-century and more.61 loc: 4058

Eusebius and his sympathizers were remarkably successful in building up influence with the Emperor in his last years - the most remarkable feature having been the pardon granted to Arius - and they also gained support from a succession of emperors who came after him in the East when the imperial power was divided once more. loc: 4063

Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind. Athanasius was fixedly determined to defend the doctrinal consensus on the nature of divinity achieved at Nicaea…the Son of God ‘has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man’.64 loc: 4071

In reaction, a middle party was concerned to unite as much of the Church as it could, and backed the formulation of creeds which said merely that the Son is ‘like’ the Father loc: 4076

Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled ‘the Apostate’, startlingly abandoned the Christian faith. He had been brought up a Christian under the tutelage of Eusebius of Nicomedia, but had come to be sickened by what he regarded as Christianity’s absurd claims, and he discreetly developed a deep fascination for Neoplatonism and the worship of the sun;…he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church’s disputes. loc: 4089

[the Cappadocian Fathers] They shifted the language at issue, trying to avoid further argument by rallying the Church to a word which differed from homoousios by one iota: so they declared that the Son and the Father are not ‘the same in essence’ but similar in essence (homoiousios).70…the Cappadocian Fathers provided a way of speaking about the Trinity which would create a balance between threeness and oneness.72 loc: 4108

The eventual solution to their worries was to take a different Greek word, hypostasis, which previously had been used with little distinction in meaning from ousia, and assign to the two different words two different technical meanings.73 As a result of this verbal pact, the Trinity consists of three equal hypostaseis in one ousia: three equal Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) sharing one Essence or Substance (Trinity or Godhead). loc: 4111

the Eastern emperor, Valens, an upholder of the Homoean settlement of 359, was killed in a major Roman defeat on the frontier at Adrianople (to the west of Constantinople), and the Western emperor, Gratian, sent a retired Spanish general to sort out the resulting chaos as the Emperor Theodosius I. Theodosius had no sympathy for the Arians, reflecting the general Latin and Western impatience with Greek scruples about language; he convened a council at Constantinople in 381 at which Arian defeat was inevitable, and Nicaea’s formulae would definitively be vindicated. loc: 4123

This first Council of Constantinople saw the formulation of the fully developed creed which is now misleadingly known as the Nicene, and has come to be liturgically recited at the Eucharist in Churches of both Eastern and Western tradition.…Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity. At much the same time, the creed which came to be known as the Apostles’ Creed was evolved in the West, embodying the same theology in shorter form. loc: 4131

Pneumatomachi…While accepting the Nicene proposition of the equality of Father and Son, they denied the equal status of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead, seeing the Spirit as the pinnacle of the created order. loc: 4136

Apollinaris wanted to emphasize Christ’s divinity and hence the truth of the Homoousion, Christ’s consubstantiality with the Father, by saying that in Jesus Christ there had indeed been a human body and soul, but rather than possessing a human mind ‘changeable and enslaved to filthy thoughts’, the Divine Logos had simply assumed flesh. The danger of this anti-Arian enthusiasm was therefore that any real idea of Christ’s humanity would be lost - an example of the difficulty of sustaining the balance between the two truths which most Christians passionately wished to affirm: that Jesus Christ was both divine and human.77 loc: 4145

The Council of Constantinople thus radically narrowed the boundaries of acceptable belief in the Church, creating a single imperial Christianity backed up by military force.…Now ‘Catholic’ Christianity was given monopoly status, not just against its own Christian rivals but against all traditional religion: ancient priesthoods lost all privileges and temples were ordered to be closed loc: 4154

the legitimate Western emperor, Valentinian II, was murdered and replaced with a modest and competent academic of traditionalist sympathies named Eugenius. Moves to restore honour and equal treatment to the old religions had not got very far when, in 394, Theodosius intervened from the East and destroyed the usurping regime. His conclusion, naturally enough, was that his policy, already launched in the East, should be extended throughout the empire. The Olympic Games were no longer celebrated after 393. Further decrees after his death banned non-Christians from service in the army, imperial administration or at Court.78 This was backed up by ruthless action: some of the most beautiful and famous sacred places of antiquity went up in flames, together with a host of lesser shrines. loc: 4157

Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished - among the ‘barbarian’ tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals.…the Goths remained enthusiastic for war, as the Roman Empire was to find out to its cost, and they came to see their theological difference from the imperial Church as an expression of their racial and cultural difference. loc: 4175

emperors had no choice but to steer the Church to preserve their own rule, while few in the Church seem to have perceived the moral dangers involved when mobs took up theology and armies marched in the name of the Christian God. loc: 4184

MIAPHYSITES AND NESTORIUS loc: 4190

the Church in the eastern Mediterranean had looked to two great cities, Antioch in Syria and Alexandria, the seats of major ‘metropolitan’ bishops or patriarchs with jurisdiction over other bishops. Now added to this was the new power of the Bishop of Constantinople, which the bishops in more long-standing Churches resented, loc: 4196

Since the Bishopric of Jerusalem had also greatly benefited from its promotion under Constantine and his mother as a centre of pilgrimage (see pp. 193-5), the Bishops of Jerusalem had ambitions to match their guardianship of the greatest shrine of the Saviour. loc: 4201

Alexandrian theologians, following Origen’s line, tended to stress the distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity, so they were reluctant to stress a further distinctness within the person of Christ. Diodore and Theodore, familiar with an Antiochene literal and historical reading of the Gospel lives of Jesus, were ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ; they also tended to stress the oneness of the whole trinitarian Godhead, so they were much more prepared to talk of two natures in Christ, truly human and truly divine, in a way which Alexandrians were inclined to think blasphemous. loc: 4214

For Theodore, it was vital to remember that Christ was the Second Adam, who had effected human redemption by offering himself as a true human being - that emphasis lay behind the frenetically self-destructive attitudes of contemporary Syrian monks towards their bodies, determined to get as close as was possible to the self-denial of the human Jesus. God had become a particular man, not humanity in general, loc: 4224

It was therefore vital to keep the distinction between the man Jesus, despite his ‘outstanding inclination to the good’, and the eternal Word, which partook of the essence of the Godhead.82 loc: 4228

Cyril could see no reason to make a distinction between two words which for him both referred to the ‘person’ and ‘nature’ of Jesus Christ: loc: 4237

By contrast, and offensively to Cyril’s ears, Theodore and those who thought like him spoke of two physeis in Jesus Christ, and made a distinction between those two natures and the one person, the theatrical mask, prosōpon.85 loc: 4240

Nestorius aggressively promoted his Antiochene views by attacking a widely popular title of honour for the Virgin Mary: Theotokos, or Bearer of God. Devotion to Mary was now becoming prominent throughout the Roman Empire: enthusiasts for the Nicene settlement of doctrine encouraged it, loc: 4242

in sheer self-defence, to stop his empire being ripped apart. After a council at Ephesus in 431 and negotiations over the next two years, Theodosius II forced a compromise on the opposing sides. It vindicated the title Theotokos, ruined Nestorius’s career for good and left ‘Nestorian’ theology permanently condemned, loc: 4254

further political manoeuvres led by Cyril’s aggressive admirer and successor, Bishop Dioscorus, which culminated in a second Council of Ephesus (449), humiliating all opponents of Alexandrian claims and outlawing all talk of two natures in Christ. loc: 4258

this council ignored a statement of the Western view on the natures of Christ presented by delegates from Leo, the Bishop of Rome…Leo and indeed the later Roman Church always maintained the absolute authority of his statement, a stance which was now becoming a habit in Rome, but the fact that Leo himself later wrote a revised statement on the same subject for an Eastern audience probably indicates that he privately recognized its shortcomings. In the words of one of the latest studies of his thought, the ‘Tome’ ‘contributed to bitter divisions which continued for sixteen centuries’.88 loc: 4264

in 451 the new regime with Marcian as emperor called a council to a city where the imperial troops could keep an eye on what was going on: Chalcedon, near Constantinople. The main concern at Chalcedon was to persuade as many people as possible to accept a middle-of-the-road settlement. The council accepted as orthodoxy the ‘Tome’ presented to Ephesus by Pope Leo’s envoys two years before, and it constructed a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: ‘the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity . . .’ This still remains the standard measure for discussion loc: 4271

On the one hand were those who adhered to a more robust affirmation of two natures in Christ and who felt that Nestorius had been treated with outrageous injustice. loc: 4291

In view of their insistence on two (dyo) natures in Christ, they could with justice be called ‘Dyophysites’, and we will trace their subsequent history primarily as ‘the Church of the East’ using this label. loc: 4295

those who treasure the memory of Cyril and his campaign against Nestorius a label which they still resent: ‘Monophysites’ (monos and physis = single nature). This latter group of Churches has always been insistent on claiming that title prized among Eastern Churches: ‘Orthodox’. loc: 4298

the label ‘Monophysite’ has widely been replaced by ‘Miaphysite’. That derives from a phrase for ‘one nature’ (mia physis) loc: 4301

Topic: Chapter 7 Defying Chalcedon: Asia and Africa (451-622)

7 Defying Chalcedon: Asia and Africa (451-622) loc: 4312   

MIAPHYSITE CHRISTIANITY AND ITS MISSIONS loc: 4314   

Of the two opposite points of view excluded by Chalcedon, Miaphysitism and Dyophysite ‘Nestorianism’, it was the Miaphysites who most worried the emperors in Constantinople. The Miaphysites’ power base, Alexandria, was one of the most important cities in the Eastern Empire, essential to the grain supply which kept the population of Constantinople in compliant mood, loc: 4341   

The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident [The emperor's choice for bishop was hounded out of office and killed] : increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ - Melchites.4 loc: 4352   

For two centuries and more a succession of emperors in Constantinople desperately tried to devise ever more intricate theological formulae which would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church. loc: 4366   

Now that the Eastern Empire stood alone, it often paid little attention to the opinions or outraged representations of the leading bishop in the surviving Western Church, the pope in Rome. A series of popes, increasingly assertive in the Church (see pp. 322-9), took it as axiomatic that their sainted predecessor Leo had said the last word on the subject of the natures in Jesus Christ in his ‘Tome’, delivered to the unreceptive Miaphysite bishops at Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225-6). Rome measured every turn of policy in Constantinople by how much it seemed to honour the ‘Tome’, loc: 4373   

from 482 until 519, Rome and Constantinople were in formal schism because the Byzantine Emperor Zeno and his bishop, Acacius, in the capital backed a formula of reunion (Henotikon) with the Miaphysites: it contained fresh condemnations of Nestorius (an easy target), praised key documents from Cyril’s attack on him, but in a manner deeply offensive to Rome remained silent on the ‘Tome of Leo’, which the Miaphysite party at Ephesus had treated with such contempt.6 loc: 4379   

He [Justinian] was torn between his wish to preserve the fragile agreement of 519 with Rome and his continuing awareness of Miaphysite partisanship in the East - not least from his energetic and unconventional wife, Theodora, who became an active sympathizer with the Miaphysite cause, loc: 4397   

Justinian sought repeatedly to make concessions to the Miaphysites, but also fitfully treated them as dangerous rebels, and remained open to advice or active intervention from the pope. loc: 4401   

the Ghassanids, on their initial conversion to Christianity, set their faces firmly against the decrees of Chalcedon.12 loc: 4423   

While the Empress was alive, she contained the threat of Miaphysite confrontation with the imperial authorities. After her death, in 548, despite Justinian’s continuing efforts to find a formula to heal the splits in the Church, Miaphysite defiance of the Court became systematic: loc: 4429   

Syrian Miaphysite Church…Monastic life flourished generally among both Syrian and Arab Christians; their monks built settlements which were as much fortresses as monasteries, loc: 4442   

suspicion of the work of the Council of Chalcedon in the various kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia, loc: 4457   

Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since. loc: 4471   

ETHIOPIA: THE CHRISTIANITY OF ‘UNION’ loc: 4495   

during the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Church, which derived its fragile link to the wider episcopal succession via Alexandria, followed the Egyptian Church into the Miaphysite camp. One of the concepts which remain central in Ethiopian theology is täwahedo, ‘union’ of humanity and divinity in the Saviour who took flesh. loc: 4531   

Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity…major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. loc: 4545   

foundational work of Ethiopian literature, the Kebra Nagast, the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour.…their son Menelik, the first Ethiopian king, brought the Ark, or tabot, back to Ethiopia, where it is kept to this day in a chapel in Aksum. loc: 4556   

With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure.…with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. loc: 4575   

THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451-622) loc: 4581   

because the Byzantine Empire reaffirmed Chalcedonian Christianity or tried to woo the Miaphysites, it was not surprising that east Syrian Christianity took on an increasingly explicit commitment to the Dyophysite cause. loc: 4588   

now a school was established little more than 150 miles eastwards in Sassanian territory, in the city of Nisibis (now Nusaybin in the extreme south-east of Turkey), ready to take on the duty of training Dyophysite clergy. In Nisibis Greek works could be translated and expounded to Syriac-speakers: the Church was concerned to preserve even the works of pre-Christian Greek philosophy so that they could be used as intellectual tools for arguments with Chalcedonian loc: 4592   

the Christian school in Gondeshapur was promoted into a centre of general learning, with a richly augmented library whose holdings united such widely separated cultures as Greece and India.…If anything helped to integrate Syriac Christianity into Sassanian elite life after its traumatic sufferings, it was the role of Gondeshapur in providing a series of skilled physicians who were Dyophysite Christians, and who became doctors first to the shahs and later to Islamic rulers in Seleucia-Ctesiphon. loc: 4602   

What was significant about this dual character of Christian activity in Arabia was how little Arabian Christians were inclined to identify with the imperial Church of Chalcedon: they set their sights on Semitic versions of the faith. loc: 4612   

By the sixth century, therefore, the Church of the East was fully established, both in its independence of any bishop in the Byzantine Empire and in its firm adherence to the theology condemned at Chalcedon. loc: 4618   

The Church of the East was now travelling astonishing distances away from the heartlands of the previous Christian centuries: eastwards along land and sea routes which connected the Roman and Sassanian worlds with China and India - and noticeably without any political support. To begin with, it must have been something like a chaplaincy for expatriates, but it was also a mission which could draw on the natural articulacy and propensity for salesmanship which made Syrian merchants so successful across Asia.…established Christian outposts among the peoples of Central Asia, loc: 4636   

One of the Syrians’ earliest extensions of the Christian faith was to India. The ‘Mar Thoma’ Church there treasures a claim to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas,…The ‘Thomas Christians’ settled down to a comfortable relationship with the non-Christian elites and society round them. loc: 4653   

It was only in the sixteenth century that the Thomas Christians’ ancient place in Indian society became a disadvantage, when they re-encountered armed and aggressive Western Catholic Christians, who were unsympathetic both to their cultural compromises and to their ‘Nestorian’ heresies, and who then did much to destroy their distinctive way of life and the records of their history loc: 4661   

Consistently, the Church of the East remained united by adhering to its Syrian roots, displaying the vigorous individuality which Syriac Christianity had exhibited from its earliest years. It gloried in its difference from the misguided Christianities further west. loc: 4663   

A theology of two natures in Christ kept the Church of the East faithful to the emphasis in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s teaching that Christ in his human nature was the Second Adam. As such, he was a true pattern for all sons and daughters of Adam, so that human beings could do their best to imitate the holiness of Christ. loc: 4669   

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. loc: 4672   

Isaac, a seventh-century monk from Qatar who briefly held the resonant title Bishop of Nineveh, took up the notion which Evagrius had derived from the writings of that audacious Alexandrian Origen that in the end all will be saved. He saw divine love even in the fire of Hell, which prepared humanity for a future ecstasy: loc: 4679   

John of Dalyatha, the Syriac emphasis on bodily penance was pressed to an extreme as forming a road back to the original purity of human nature. John proclaimed that through humility and contemplation (especially while prostrate), a monk could unite his purged nature not simply with all creation, but also with his creator, to loc: 4686   

although the Dyophysite Church did indeed likewise translate many of its biblical, liturgical and other texts into the languages of the East, it still hung on to Syriac as a common liturgical and theological language in the most exotic of settings, as far east as China, using the ‘Nestorian’ script developed out of the original Syriac Estrangela. Unlike most alphabetic scripts, neither this loc: 4698   

Crucially, in contrast to the Miaphysites in Ethiopia, Nubia and Armenia, the Church of the East never permanently captured the allegiance of any royal family, loc: 4707   

a new Catholicos should be chosen for the Church, ending a hiatus of twenty years in which Shah Khusrau had prevented the office being filled. The man singled out, Ishoyahb II, proved an outstanding diplomat of wide vision who gave official encouragement to those taking Christianity into China. He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen. Alopen was well received on his arrival in 635. The occasion was long remembered and celebrated by Chinese Christians, for it led to the foundation of the first of several monasteries in China, loc: 4719   

True Cross,…To the fury and humiliation of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, the Shah seized the Cross from Jerusalem when he sacked the city in 614. loc: 4735   

Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb … in 630, loc: 4738   

Kavad II?s murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of short-lived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghass?nids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghass?nids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam.nids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassānids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. loc: 4743   

Topic: Chapter 8 Islam: The Great Realignment (622-1500)

8 Islam: The Great Realignment (622-1500) loc: 4754

MUHAMMAD AND THE COMING OF ISLAM loc: 4755   

Arabia was a society very conscious of the ecological disaster caused by the failure of the dam at Marib (see p. 245). Travellers in the south-west of the peninsula could see for themselves a dying society apparently unable to save itself, after centuries of wealth and fame throughout the region. loc: 4764   

Muslim sources have often ascribed the Qur’an’s power to its exceptional beauty in the Arabic language, loc: 4788   

Conversion to Islam can therefore be a deeply felt aesthetic experience loc: 4789   

Muhammad proclaimed Islam as the original truth which later centuries had obscured. loc: 4807   

His theme of oneness is a clear contrast with the Christian quarrels about the nature of Christ which Chalcedon had failed to heal. loc: 4808   

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 loc: 4812   

It is possible to interpret his image of himself and his destiny as the last in the succession of Hebrew prophets, and his initial mission as a resolve to restore a monotheism concentrated on the Jerusalem Temple, which Christians had compromised. loc: 4822   

Muslims now occupied much of the world that over the previous six centuries had become Christian, including its earliest historic centres, and they have continued to occupy it ever since. In the end that decisively moved the centre of Christian gravity westwards. The military crisis caused by the late-sixth-century wars between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and the short-sighted destruction by those war-locked empires of the various Christian buffer states along their borders (see pp. 253-4), gave a perfect opportunity for the armies to sweep first north out of Arabia, then east and west into Byzantine and Sassanian territory. loc: 4834   

The Muslim conquerors did little to explain their faith to their new subjects or to convert them to it. loc: 4844   

The result was one of the most rapid shifts of power in history.11 Between 634 and 637, three battles crippled the armies of Byzantium and the Sassanians. In February 638, only eight years after the Emperor Heraclius had triumphantly restored the True Cross to Christian Jerusalem, the city fell to Muslim forces after a year’s siege; it was in any case a shadow of its former self, devastated only a quarter-century earlier by the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II. loc: 4848   

What the Dome of the Rock proclaimed was the arrival of a new empire which would replace the surviving Christian empire of the Byzantines; the city of Constantinople was now the goal of what seemed an unstoppable programme of conquest. loc: 4864   

The two Christian victories at Constantinople and in France between them preserved a Europe in which Christianity remained dominant, and as a result the centre of energy and unfettered development and change in the Christian world decisively shifted west from its old Eastern centres. loc: 4870   

ISLAM AND THE EAST loc: 4873   

Muslims put into practice what was said to have been one of Muhammad’s deathbed commands and set about eliminating Christianity from the peninsula. loc: 4876   

Christians and Jews as People of the Book (and later, by extensions of dubious logic but practical utility, other significant religious minorities) were organized into separate communities or millets, defined by their common practice of the same religion, which was guaranteed as protected as long as it was primarily practised in private. They were given a specified tax burden and their second-class status was defined as that of a dhimmi (a non-Muslim protected under a dhimma). loc: 4891   

The conquerors thus remained a military and governing elite, aloof from their conquered populations, loc: 4894   

Chalcedonian Orthodoxy like John’s was obviously going to be at a long-term disadvantage once the protection of the Byzantine armies had been removed. loc: 4933   

Elsewhere, neither Miaphysites nor Dyophysites had much reason to look back with regret on the disappearance of the imperial power and its Church. loc: 4941   

Abbasids gave an unprecedented official jurisdiction to the Dyophysite patriarch over all Christians in their caliphate, which stretched from Egypt into Central Asia. loc: 4946   

the value which the Abbasid caliphs placed on the medical services of the Christian physicians was a major reason why Baghdad became the setting for a new institution of higher learning which, from its foundation in 832, came to outshine the schools of Nisibis and Gondeshapur. loc: 4951   

The Abbasid caliphate was interested in drawing on all the resources of pre-Islamic learning that might be useful to it, and the chief source of this was the literature preserved by the Church of the East, translations from Greek into Syriac. loc: 4953   

Now an industry of retranslation began, this time into Arabic: the structured analysis and science of Aristotle, the dialogues of Plato, the medical texts of Galen and the followers of Hippocrates, the geography and cosmology of Ptolemy were only the star items on the library shelves. loc: 4956   

these texts, translated yet again into Latin, which were the source of the reimport of swathes of lost Classical knowledge into Latin Europe in later centuries. loc: 4960   

the mass of texts encouraged a new copying technology imported from China along the trade routes which the Eastern Christians dominated: instead of papyrus or expensive parchment, cloth rags were transformed into paper, durable and comparatively easy to make and cheap as a writing material to cope with the demand.24 loc: 4964   

THE CHURCH IN CHINA loc: 4976   

in the mid-eighth century, thanks to the patronage of one general victorious in civil wars, Christians found themselves over several decades in a position of advantage in China which would not be repeated for some centuries. loc: 4980   

integration of the Dyophysite Christian community into imperial life. loc: 4990   

Taoism, after all, had a vision of the original goodness of human nature which was congenial to Dyophysites emphasizing the whole humanity of Christ’s separate human nature alongside his divinity. Yet Dyophysite Christians were also ready to model themselves on another faith which the Chinese recognized as having come from beyond their borders, but which was by now well established and widely respected: Buddhism. So Alopen and his successors presented their faith in the form of sutras, discourses in Buddhist style, and they had no inhibitions in presenting Buddhism as a form of truth, albeit one which needed extending. loc: 4994   

All this suggests a faith which, to a degree highly unusual in Christian history, allowed itself to listen to other great interpretations of the divine. loc: 5012   

the years of good fortune were comparatively brief. During the mid-ninth century the Emperor Wuzong turned against all religions which he regarded as foreign and the Church suffered accordingly. loc: 5018   

Tang dynasty finally collapsed in 907, the western trade routes which remained the lifeline of the Church were closed loc: 5020   

THE MONGOLS: NEW HOPE AND CATASTROPHE loc: 5025   

The Mongols’ rise among the various peoples of the steppes was comparatively sudden at the end of the twelfth century. loc: 5026   

they were inclined to give an ear to any religious ideas which took their fancy loc: 5030   

Christianity gained its first success among the Mongols, it was thanks to the long-dead Syrian St Sergius - a tribute to how this hugely popular military saint had impressed himself on imaginations far away from the site of his Roman martyrdom loc: 5032   

Amid the immensity of the Central and East Asian steppes, with few clergy of any persuasion to badger their beliefs into tidiness, Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. loc: 5041   

As a result of Genghis’s carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China. Under Kublai Khan, Dyophysite Christians returned to the centre of power in China. loc: 5051   

The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. loc: 5055   

Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared loc: 5061   

The Mongols’ conquests turned west as well. They finally shattered the power of the already declining Abbasid dynasty; their leader in this was Il-Khan (‘Subordinate Khan’) Hülagü, whose principal wife belonged to the Church of the East. loc: 5068   

the Christians of Baghdad, who were the only community whom the Mongols spared massacre when the city fell in 1258; loc: 5070   

Already a train of events in the 1250s had begun the downfall of Christianity in Central Asia, signalling the end of any possibility of a tame Christian Mongol empire. loc: 5092   

conversion to Islam of Berke, one of the royal family of the Mongol grouping known as the Kipchak Khanate or Golden Horde, loc: 5093   

Berke allied with the enemies of the Il-Khans, the Islamic rulers (Mamluks) of Egypt. It was a dangerous split in Mongol solidarity, which was fatally prolonged by an accident: the death of the Great Khan Möngke far away in Mongolia. Mongol leaders returned to their heartland to choose his successor, leaving their forces in a weakened state, and the Mamluks were able to inflict a crushing defeat at ‘Ayn Jālūt in the Holy Land in 1260.39 loc: 5096   

The future lay with those Mongol rulers increasingly committed to Islam. The fortunes of the Church of the East plummeted still further with the rise to power from the mid-fourteenth century of the Mongol warlord Timur or Tamerlane, intent on restoring the glory of Mongol power from its fractured state. loc: 5102   

Muslims generally fared better in his conquests, and it was Christianity in vast swathes of its former eastern strongholds which chiefly suffered.40 loc: 5107   

From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities. loc: 5111   

In an increasingly hostile Islamic world, embittered at the memory of the alien outrage of the Western Crusades, the ancient privileged place of Christians at the Courts of monarchs disappeared. loc: 5114   

The Armenians had centuries of experience in being buffeted by neighbouring great powers and they were long used to migrating away from disaster. These desperate years sent more of them travelling through eastern Europe as far away as Poland, let alone whatever refuge they could find in Asia - but as with the Jews in diaspora, their sufferings sharpened their skills in commerce and negotiation, skills which they were ready to apply to their religious troubles. loc: 5117   

Church unions took place in eastern Europe in the fifteenth century, in which Armenian congregations kept their liturgy and distinctive devotional practices, while acknowledging papal primacy as ‘Uniates’. loc: 5129   

the Armenian hierarchy clinging on in the Armenian heartland furiously opposed union with the papacy and the word ‘Uniate’ has often carried an abusive flavour. loc: 5132   

ISLAM AND THE AFRICAN CHURCHES loc: 5147   

The story of Christianity in Africa into the early modern period is likewise one of defensiveness and decline nearly everywhere, leading inexorably to its complete extinction along the North African coast and in Nubia. loc: 5148   

Eventually in the twelfth century the rigidly intolerant Almohad dynasty insisted on mass conversion of both Jews and Christians. loc: 5152   

The Miaphysite faith of the Copts meant that their Muslim overlords did not identify them with the Byzantine Empire and generally treated them with tolerance. loc: 5160   

Greater and irreversible troubles came when the Latin Crusades began and were followed by Mongol advances.…it was now easy for Egyptian Muslims and their rulers to regard any Christian as a fifth columnist, loc: 5169   

Their survival over the next three centuries was through their own efforts and the stubborn maintenance of ancient traditions in their monasteries, most of which could survive only in the most remote or poverty-stricken locations. loc: 5177   

Ethiopia stood out as still a Christian monarchy, protected by its rugged geography and distance…the preoccupations and character of Ethiopian faith developed on very individual (not to say eccentric) lines. loc: 5194   

At the end of the thirteenth century, another dynasty supplanted the Zagwe, and between its founder, Yekuno Amlak (reigned 1270-85), and his grandson Amdä Seyon (reigned 1314-44), it came to restore the military might of Ethiopia. It appears that the Egyptian Coptic Church was affronted at the usurpation and refused to supply an abun, so for some considerable time the Ethiopians had to resort to bishops from Syria to preserve their episcopal succession.53 Such internationally expressed doubts needed addressing and a sustained campaign began to plug the dynasty into ancient history, with the aid of King Solomon: loc: 5216   

Ethiopian Church’s identification with Israel really began to become distinctive. loc: 5222   

The Church was anxious to outlaw polygamy, which, despite having a perfectly respectable presence in the Tanakh, is clearly unacceptable in the New Testament. Ethiopian monarchs conformed to African tradition and habitually took several wives: loc: 5235   

This aroused opposition, especially from Christians encouraged by Alexandrian-born abuns who knew the practice of the wider Church. loc: 5248   

At issue was how far the Ethiopian Church was prepared to travel in its own direction and ignore what links it had with the wider world: loc: 5251   

Marian devotion was hugely reinforced in the Ethiopian Church.59 loc: 5263   

all his subjects should be tattooed on their foreheads with the words ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and on their right and left hands respectively ‘I deny the Devil’ and ‘I am a servant of Mary’. loc: 5265   

monks of the House of Ewostatewos agreed to be reconciled to the abun and accept ordination at his hands; so the forces of Ethiopian particularism were not terminally separated from the Church’s link to the wider Christian world. loc: 5271   

ancient link with the Patriarch of Alexandria. loc: 5281   

links to a wider Catholicity were still to a Christianity which rejected the Roman imperial Church’s conclusions at Chalcedon. loc: 5282   

Prester John turned out to be a disappointing myth, and what it chiefly revealed was just how little Western Chalcedonian Christians knew about centuries of Christian struggle, scholarship, sanctity and heroism in another world. loc: 5296   

Topic: Chapter 9 The Making of Latin Christianity (300-500)

Chapter 9 The Making of Latin Christianity (300-500) loc: 5308   

THE ROME OF THE POPES (300-400) loc: 5309   

The pope’s claim to a special place in the life of the universal Church came rather from the tombs of the Apostles, and from the end of the third century it was reinforced by a further accident of history. loc: 5334   

The Emperor Diocletian’s reorganization of the whole empire…had a major and permanent effect on the city. Diocletian removed the real centre of imperial government to four other capitals more strategically placed for emperors to deal with the problematic northern and eastern frontiers of the empire - Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Sirmium in what is now Serbia, Mediolanum, the modern Milan, and Augusta Trevorum, the modern Trier. Emperors never again returned to Rome for extended residence. loc: 5338   

vacuum in secular power in the ancient capital meant that the Christian bishop was given an opportunity to expand his power and position. loc: 5341   

combination of advantages made it worthwhile for Greek Christians in their various intractable disputes to appeal to popes for support, loc: 5343   

Constantine gave the Church in the city a set of Christian buildings which in some important respects set patterns for the future of Christian architecture,…their splendour formed a major element in the fascination which Rome came to exercise for Western Christians, loc: 5348   

major Christian building projects had to be beyond the city walls.2 loc: 5353   

circus-shaped churches of Constantine in Rome seemed to have been designed also just like the circuses of old Roman society as meeting places for great numbers of Christian believers, loc: 5359   

he gave sudden promotion to the cult of Peter far beyond the Apostle to the Gentiles, through a massive investment in what became the largest church in Rome. loc: 5364   

Like Constantine’s work at St Lawrence’s shrine, the Emperor’s gift to Peter was not a conventional basilica or a congregational church or cathedral, but a huge structure intended for burials, funeral feasts and pilgrimages, all under the patronage of the saint. loc: 5366   

St Lawrence’s and St Peter’s churches thus witnessed to the newly Christian Emperor’s special concern for death and honourable burial, a contrast to the attitude of the Saviour himself. loc: 5377   

Emperor built in all six funeral churches in Rome, capable of accommodating thousands of Christians in death as well as in life. loc: 5386   

The most significant pope to exploit the new possibilities was Damasus (366-84). After a highly discreditable election, in which his partisans slaughtered more than a hundred supporters of a rival candidate, and some very shaky years following that while he established his authority, Damasus sought to highlight the traditions and glory of his see.11 He was the first pope to use the distant language favoured by the imperial bureaucracy in his correspondence. He took a keen interest in the process of making Rome and its suburbs into a Christian pilgrimage city, loc: 5401   

One aim of this programme was to place a new emphasis on the role of Peter rather than the joint role of Peter and Paul in the Roman past. Moreover, it was in Damasus’s time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.13 loc: 5409   

a conscious effort to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer. loc: 5416   

In 382 he persuaded his secretary, a brilliant but quarrelsome scholar called Jerome, to begin a new translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin, to replace several often conflicting Latin versions from previous centuries. loc: 5419   

if Jerome had not been so successful in his campaign for sainthood, and in persuading future writers that it was as much of a self-sacrifice for a scholar to sit reading a book as it was for St Simeon to sit on top of his pillar in a Syrian desert, it might have been far more difficult for countless monks to justify the hours that they spent reading and enjoying ancient texts, and copying them out for the benefit of posterity. Ultimately the beneficiary was Western civilization.17 loc: 5444   

he constructed a Latin biblical text so impressive in its scholarship and diction that it had an unchallenged place at the centre of Western culture for more than a thousand years. loc: 5449   

That was the problem for Damasus and his new breed of establishment Christians. They wanted to annex the glories of ancient Rome, but they had no time for the gods who were central to it. loc: 5453   

A RELIGION FIT FOR GENTLEMEN (300-400) loc: 5459   

Roman noblemen valued ‘nobility’ or ‘distinction’:…Roman elite also put a positive value on wealth, loc: 5462   

Churchmen squared this circle by encouraging the rich to give generously out of their good fortune to the poor, for almsgiving chimed in with their own priorities: bishops were aware of the advantages to themselves and to the prestige of the Church in general of being able to dispense generous charity to the poor. loc: 5463   

Christians could not and would not dispense with that icon of Roman literature from the age of the first emperor, the poetry of Virgil. This was after all one of the most potent links between Rome and Greece,…Luckily the great Augustan poet could be pictured as foretelling the coming of Christ…symbolized by his role as Dante’s guide through the underworld in the great fourteenth-century poem Inferno.20 loc: 5481   

The Church, particularly after the terminal crisis of the Western Empire in the early fifth century, became a safer prospect than the increasingly failing civil service for those aspiring to serve or direct their communities; often Roman noblemen would become bishops because they saw the office as the only way to protect what survived of the world they loved. loc: 5505   

Ambrose came along at the head of a detachment of troops to keep order and, as he was delivering some crisp military sentiments to the crowd, a child’s voice pierced the church: ‘Ambrose for Bishop!’ It was the perfect solution; the mob took up the shout.24 Consecrated bishop after an indecently hasty progress through baptism and ordination, Ambrose proved a remarkable success, at least in political terms. He was ruthless in dealing both with the opponents of Nicaea and with a series of Christian emperors. loc: 5515   

After these years of struggle, Ambrose was well prepared for self-assertion, or the assertion of the Church’s power, against the pious Nicene Emperor Theodosius I. loc: 5532   

AUGUSTINE: SHAPER OF THE WESTERN CHURCH loc: 5550   

Confessions, a gigantic prayer-narrative which is a direct conversation - I-Thou - with God. loc: 5557   

in Milan he also became fascinated by Bishop Ambrose. Here, for the first time, he met a Christian whose self-confident culture he could respect and whose sermons, sonorous and rich in their language, made up for the crudity and vulgarity of the Bible which had distressed the young Augustine. loc: 5572   

In a state bordering on nervous breakdown, and physically unwell, Augustine arrived in 386 at a crisis which was to bring him a new serenity and a new certainty.…his plans for marriage were abandoned for a life of celibacy. loc: 5586   

On Augustine’s announcement of the resolution of his torment, Monica ‘was jubilant with triumph and glorified you . . . And you turned her sadness into rejoicing . . . far sweeter and more chaste than any she had hoped to find in children begotten of my flesh.’ There is more than one way of interpreting this maternal triumph.32 loc: 5588   

turbulent Church politics of North Africa. Augustine’s Catholic Christian Church was connected with the rest of the Mediterranean Church and with the imperial administration, but it was a minority in Africa, faced with the deep-rooted localism of the Donatists, cherishing grievances now a century old from the Great Persecution of Diocletian loc: 5598   

In 391 Augustine happened to visit the struggling Catholic congregation in the city of Hippo Regius (now Annaba in Algeria), the most important port of the province after Carthage. The bishop, an idiosyncratic but shrewd old Greek named Valerius, encouraged his flock to bully this brilliant stranger into being ordained priest and soon Augustine was coadjutor (assistant) bishop in the town. From Valerius’s death until his own in 430, he remained Bishop of Hippo. loc: 5603   

Donatists, in terms not just of politics but also of the challenges that their theology posed to the Catholics. Proud of their unblemished record in time of persecution, they proclaimed that the Church was a gathered pure community. loc: 5608   

Augustine thought that this was not what ‘One, Holy and Catholic’ meant. The Catholic Church was a Church not so much of the pure as those who tried or longed to be pure. Unlike the Donatists, it was in communion with a great mass of Christian communities throughout the known world. loc: 5609   

he tried to bring the Donatists back into the Catholic fold by negotiation. A series of conferences failed; the old bitterness lay too deep. Faced with government hostility and orders to conform, the Donatists remained defiant, and the behaviour of both sides began deteriorating in a miserable cycle of violence.36 By 412 Augustine had lost patience and he backed harsh new government measures against the Donatists. loc: 5615   

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. loc: 5620   

How could God’s providence allow the collapse of the manifestly Christian Roman Empire, especially the sack of Rome by barbarian armies in 410?…the response which Augustine was making at the same time: The City of God (De Civitate Dei). It was his most monumental work and it took him thirteen years from 413 to write. loc: 5628   

For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, loc: 5633   

it is difficult not to feel that, in human experience at least, pure evil is more than pure nothingness; nor does Augustine seek to explain how a being created flawless comes to turn towards evil - in effect, to create it from nothing.39 loc: 5637   

Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’.40 All the institutions which we know form part of a struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history.…No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, loc: 5643   

Ironically, much of the influence of The City of God over the next thousand years came from the eagerness of medieval churchmen to expand on this identification in their efforts to make the Church supreme on earth, equating the earthly city with opponents of ecclesiastical power like some of the Holy Roman Emperors. loc: 5647   

Augustine and other like-minded contemporaries followed thoughts of Tertullian two centuries before and talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt inherited from Adam which they termed ‘original sin’. This likewise seemed to Pelagius to provide a false excuse for Christians passively to avoid making any moral effort. He was determined to say that our God-given natures are not so completely corrupt that we can do nothing towards our own salvation: loc: 5657   

The consequence was that Pelagius believed that the nature of a ‘Holy Church’ was based on the holiness of its members: exactly what the Donatists said about the Church,…As the controversy developed, Pelagius’s followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose. We can choose to turn to God. We have free will. loc: 5664   

Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God.…would have been impossible to sustain the mixed human society of vice and virtue which Augustine presents in the ‘City of God’, where no Christian has the right to avoid everyday civic responsibilities in this fallen world, loc: 5670   

Celestius, arrived in North Africa and began expounding Pelagius’s views to an extreme point where he left no possibility of affirming original sin. So he said that there was no sin to remit in baptism: ‘sin is not born with a man, it is subsequently committed by the man; for it is shown to be a fault, not of nature, but of the human will’.48 loc: 5677   

Augustine’s crusade against the Pelagians eventually resulted in their defeat and the dismissal from Church office of all their highly placed supporters. loc: 5684   

long series of tracts which he wrote attacking Pelagian thought. Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God’s grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace. God has made the decision before all time, so some are foreordained to be saved through grace - a predestined group of the elect. The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam’s original fall, in which we all have a part through original sin: loc: 5686   

It would probably do more justice to Augustine to say that he was heir to the world-denying impulses of Platonists and Stoics.…Amid many approving references to Plato in The City of God, he can assert at length that Platonists are near-Christians; ‘that is why we rate the Platonists above the rest of the philosophers’.52 loc: 5703   

Christians seeing God through Neoplatonic eyes. God in Platonic mode was transcendent, other, remote. When his image appeared in mosaic or painting, characteristically as the resurrected Christ the Judge of the Last Days, loc: 5706   

That created all the more need for the Church to recognize a myriad of courtiers who could intercede with their imperial Saviour for ordinary humans seeking salvation or help in their everyday lives. These were the saints. loc: 5710   

People needed patrons in this world to get things done or merely to survive, and it was natural for them to assume that they would need them in the next world too. Moreover, friendship, amicitia, was a prominent aristocratic value for Romans, and it would be easy and attractive to see a saint as a useful friend in Heaven as well as a patron.53 loc: 5715   

he was inspired to develop a defence of the doctrine of three equal persons in one substance, loc: 5730   

Augustine discerned within humans an image of the Trinity, or at least analogies by which fallen humans might understand. First, Father, Son and Spirit could be represented respectively by three aspects of human consciousness:…the mind itself, its knowledge which is at once its offspring and self-derived ‘word’, and thirdly love. These three are one, and one single substance. loc: 5734   

He went on to present the analogy in a different form, with the persons of Father, Son and Spirit corresponding to three aspects of the human mind itself: respectively memory, understanding and will - in the same way, these were ‘not three substances, but one substance’.56 loc: 5737   

Father and Son are necessarily defined by their interrelationship, but the name ‘Spirit’ seems to derive its individual character from its own nature, without association.…Through this double procession from Father and Son, the Spirit represented to humanity ‘that mutual charity by which the Father and the Son love one another’.58 loc: 5753   

Those who read Augustine later would nevertheless notice that the Nicene Creed of Constantinople of 381 said only that the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father’. Should this not be extended, on Augustine’s analogy, to say that the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son’? loc: 5754   

while the West eventually agreed that this alteration should be made to the Creed, the alteration became a matter of high offence in the East loc: 5757   

What we need to remember is that Augustine’s bleak view of human nature and capabilities was formed against a background of the destruction of the world he loved.…greatest disappointments ever experienced by the Church, the Western Roman Empire of the 390s, which had promised to be an image of God’s kingdom on earth, loc: 5762   

EARLY MONASTICISM IN THE WEST (400-500) loc: 5766   

great disappointment for the imperial Church in the West inspired Western Christians to imitate the monastic life of the Eastern Church. Among the first was Martin, who became one of the most important saints in Western Latin devotion. An ex-soldier like the Egyptian pioneer Pachomius, he abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life apart from the world. Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West’s first known monastic community at what seems to have been an ancient local cultic site in a marshy valley, now called Ligugé; it was near the city of Pictavia (now Poitiers), loc: 5768   

Martin was one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum (now Tours). While bishop, he still lived as a monk, and his second monastic foundation near Tours was destined to fare rather better than Ligugé in its later monastic history: as Marmoutier, it remained one of the most famous and ancient abbeys in France loc: 5775   

aggressive campaigner for the elimination of the traditional religion still strong in rural areas of western Europe loc: 5779   

biography created by his fervent admirer Sulpicius Severus,…What Sulpicius had achieved was a strident assertion that the Latin West could produce a holy man who was the equal of any wonder-worker or spiritual athlete in the East - yet another building block in the growing edifice of Western self-confidence. loc: 5795   

Bishop Martin’s work excited those who sought to preach their faith in similar areas where city life was either decaying or had never existed, and it can be no coincidence that now a number of individuals began taking missionary initiatives beyond Gaul and even beyond the empire. loc: 5800   

new monastic movement caused tensions and problems.…fervent promotion of asceticism…aroused anger by a hostility to sex and even marriage loc: 5811   

Jerome took a significant step in the long process, particularly pronounced in the Western Church, by which the celibate state came to be considered superior to marriage. loc: 5820   

A more short-term tragedy was the debacle surrounding the efforts of Priscillian, a Spanish aristocrat, to establish his own form of the ascetic life. loc: 5821   

likely that his rejection of the world went beyond mainstream ascetic preoccupations into some form of gnostic dualism. loc: 5824   

Magnus Maximus, took over an ecclesiastical case against Priscillian; in an effort to build up support in the Christian establishment, Maximus had the ascetic leader and some of his close circle executed for heresy, the first time that this had happened within the Christian community. He was burned at the stake, the only Western Christian to be given the treatment which the pagan Emperor Diocletian had prescribed for heretics until the eleventh century. loc: 5826   

Eastern and Western monasticism combined fruitfully in the monk John Cassian,…ancient port of Massilia (now Marseilles) still flourished. Here he founded new monastic communities, perhaps with a conscious agenda of improving on monasteries such as those founded by Bishop Martin of Tours loc: 5836   

Cassian was an enthusiastic Origenist, with all that implied in an optimistic outlook on human capacity to cooperate with God and grow in the spiritual life.…theme of ‘purity of heart’ as the goal of monastic endeavour.…aim of stripping out the passions from human consciousness, was to lead on to a union with the glorified, resurrected Christ. The vehicle for this was a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation.68 loc: 5846   

provoked a confrontation with the theology of that great Westerner whose call to serve his Church had led him to turn away from monastic life: Augustine. loc: 5848   

Much as Cassian admired the Egyptian hermits, he felt that their life represented a way of perfection which was not for all, and that most ascetics should live in community. His instructions for such communities, principally set out in his Institutes, were of great influence on a later monk apparently born around 480, a half-century after Cassian’s death. This monk, Benedict, admiring what Cassian had written, created a Rule which became the basis of Western monastic life. loc: 5868   

This Rule was intended to guide a number of monastic communities in south Italy, principally the mountain-top house of Monte Cassino loc: 5880   

Benedict give honourable mention to the hermit’s vocation, seeing it as a more heroic stage of asceticism than community life, but then Benedict takes over the Master’s brutally contemptuous description of two other variants on the monastic life: groups of two or three living without a Rule, and those individual monks who wandered from place to place - the Rule regards them as parasites on settled communities. loc: 5882   

wandering holy man remained a common and widely honoured figure in the Eastern Churches. loc: 5886   

The Rule was there to describe how to construct a single community, living in obedience to its abbot and under the same Rule as communities round it, yet fully independent of any other.…single-minded emphasis on obedience, including the corporal punishment…balance between the spiritual growth of each monk and the general peace and well-being of the community loc: 5890   

Discipline, in fact, proved to be one of the chief attractions of Benedictine monasteries, in an age enmired in terrifying lawlessness which longed for the lost order of Roman society. loc: 5891   

Because of its simplicity, it has proved very adaptable, forming the basis of much Western monastic life for both men and women to the present day loc: 5893   

adapted Benedict’s twin commands to ‘labour and pray’ so that labour might include scholarship. loc: 5895   

Topic: Chapter 10 Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500-1000)

10 Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500-1000) loc: 5898   

CHANGING ALLEGIANCES: ROME, BYZANTIUM AND OTHERS loc: 5900   

Roman aristocracy had been shattered by repeated wars in Italy, ironically mostly resulting from efforts by emperors in Constantinople to restore the old Italy under their own rule. loc: 5904   

in the decades after 550, Latin culture came within a hair’s breadth of extinction: the witness to that is the survival of datable manuscript copies of texts. The laborious process of copying manuscripts, the only way in which the fragile products of centuries of accumulating knowledge could be preserved, virtually came to an end, and would not be taken up again for two and a half centuries in the time of Charlemagne (see pp. 352-3). In the intervening period, much of Classical literature was lost to us for ever. loc: 5906   

young Gallo-Roman noblemen are said to have formed a disproportionate number of those joining the pioneer monasteries of Bishop Martin of Tours in the late fourth century, and that many of them went on to be bishops (see p. 313). Frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed. loc: 5914   

capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service, or who had indeed started out as officials in it, now entered the Church as the main career option available to them, when in the East they still had the option of imperial bureaucracy. loc: 5917   

Western theology has been characterized by a tidy-mindedness which reflects the bureaucratic precision of the Latin language: not always to the benefit of its spirituality. loc: 5920   

the leadership of the Western Church chose a middle path which was to prove of huge significance for its future. It continued to stand aloof from the Arianism of the Gothic peoples, but it increasingly distanced itself from Constantinople, and it developed an increasing focus on the Bishop of Rome. loc: 5925   

493, the Arian Ostrogoth military leader Theoderic seized the city of Ravenna, loc: 5927   

Theoderic thus proclaimed his Arian faith to the world with all the resources of Christian art and architecture. loc: 5945   

virtually everything else produced by the Arians has been deliberately erased from the record. loc: 5947   

Theoderic allowed the Catholic Church to flourish, and used the skills of Roman and Catholic aristocrats in his administration. The most distinguished and learned of them, Boethius, loc: 5949   

Theoderic and other ‘barbarian’ rulers who did not match his flamboyance could be seen as protectors of the Western Catholic Church against Byzantine emperors who, from the mid-fifth century, frequently alienated and angered Catholic leaders in the West. loc: 5959   

around that time the embattled Pope Leo I began regularly using a description of his office which proclaimed him with a modesty intended as a strident assertion of inherited historic authority, ‘the unworthy heir of blessed Peter’ loc: 5962   

‘Acacian’ schism of East and West between 482 and 519 loc: 5968   

Pope Gelasius I (492-6) tried to pull Constantinople back into line, loc: 5970   

in 494 Gelasius argued in a letter to the Eastern emperor, Anastasius I, that God had provided two ruling authorities in the world, monarchs and bishops. They were charged to use their powers to work together to promote God’s purposes for his people, but ‘of these, the burden of the priests is greater in so far as they will have answer to the Lord for the kings of men themselves at the divine judgement’. loc: 5971   

asserted that the emperor ought to defer to the clergy in all matters concerning the faith.4 loc: 5975   

laid down a principle which in the West was respected by monarchs and much exploited and extended by future Church leaders, loc: 5976   

During the schism, there was another event of great significance for the future of western Europe: one powerful barbarian king within the former Western Empire turned his allegiance to Catholic Christianity. His power base was in northern Gaul and his name Clovis; loc: 5978   

devotion to the saint of the Catholic Church who had been first a soldier and then a bishop, Martin of Tours. The God of Martin won Clovis his victories, just as that same God had favoured Constantine two centuries before. loc: 5984   

The grant of a consular title could not be a real assertion of Byzantine power, but it represented the Emperor’s eagerness for alliance with an unexpected Catholic Christian ally against Arian rulers in the West; loc: 5990   

Now the Latin Church could look to a powerful military patron in the West who was neither an Eastern emperor of dubious orthodoxy nor a heretical Arian like Theoderic. loc: 5993   

If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable. loc: 5997   

At the heart of the Catholic victory was the dead bishop-saint Martin of Tours, now a trophy saint for the Merovingian dynasty. loc: 5999   

Besides Martin of Tours, there was a third-century bishop martyred in northern Gaul in the time of Decius, Dionysius (in later French, Denis); he had been the first bishop of Lutetia, the city which was the forerunner of Paris, which Clovis had refounded as his capital on the island site of the old settlement. loc: 6010   

nun called Genovefa (in later French, Geneviève), who had built a tomb for the martyr Denis and is said to have organized Lutetia’s resistance to invading Huns in the mid-fifth century.8 Towards the end of her life, she had a great personal influence on Clovis when Lutetia’s surrender to his armies became inevitable. She probably played a part in his conversion and his new enthusiasm for Denis. loc: 6013   

The alliance between these saints and a Christian Catholic monarchy of France remained one of the great political facts about Christianity in western Europe down to the nineteenth century, and later French monarchs came to glory in their title of ‘the Most Christian King’. loc: 6023   

The then pope, Hormisdas (514-23), was determined to drive a hard bargain for restoring the two halves of the imperial Church to communion together. He demanded that the bishops of the Eastern Church should subscribe to a formula of agreement which would leave Rome in an unchallengeable position: loc: 6033   

533 Justinian began his programme of reconquest in Italy, and in 536 publicly proclaimed his programme of reuniting the Mediterranean under Byzantine rule. loc: 6044   

Silverius, son to Pope Hormisdas, became pope in 536 with the backing of successive Ostrogoth monarchs in Ravenna, and so the papacy became irresistibly drawn into the military confrontation between Ravenna and Constantinople. When Justinian humiliated the Ostrogoths and made Ravenna his western capital, there was an eager potential successor, Vigilius, archdeacon to the Pope, waiting to supplant Silverius. As a result the new pope was a creature of the Emperor - soon, indeed, after an imperial invitation to Constantinople, his virtual prisoner. loc: 6045   

Between 547 and 548 the hapless pope reluctantly added his agreement to imperial edicts (‘Three Chapters’) which included condemnations of three deceased theologians whose views were undoubtedly Dyophysite, but whom Chalcedon had specifically declared orthodox loc: 6051   

a pope had committed himself to a major statement of heresy, coerced by an emperor.10 loc: 6058   

Arianism was weakening: the Byzantine conquests in Italy had dealt it a severe blow. Yet Justinian’s military successes in Italy and North Africa in turn melted away through the ruinous wars of the later sixth century, leaving more scope for papal assertions of Rome’s place in the Western Church. loc: 6062   

Church’s constant search for a source of authority to solve its disputes encouraged the trend. loc: 6066   

The battered prestige of the Bishop of Rome was restored and then extended by the pontificate of Pope Gregory I (590-604), loc: 6068   

he was Prefect of the City of Rome before becoming a monk in the city. Gregory was the first monk to become pope, loc: 6070   

This Roman aristocrat showed no enthusiasm for the claims of the surviving Roman emperor. loc: 6073   

Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent. loc: 6082   

the first writer whose work has survived who spends much time discussing how clergy should offer pastoral care and preach to laypeople: loc: 6086   

MISSIONS IN NORTHERN EUROPE (500-600) loc: 6093   

Gregory’s dispatch of a mission to the English in Britannia marked a crucial stage in the Western Latin Church’s change of direction away from Byzantium and towards the north and west. loc: 6098   

The English mission was the first in which a Bishop of Rome had made any effort to extend the existing frontiers of Christianity. loc: 6104   

It is curious and probably significant that previous major Christian missionary efforts had nearly all been undertaken by people whom the imperial Chalcedonian Church labelled as heretics loc: 6105   

The one substantial exception to this had been the initiatives of Celtic Britons, who were Catholic Christians, strongly influenced by the vigorous Catholic Church of Gaul. loc: 6108   

Patrick was to become Apostle to Ireland and eventually, through the worldwide wanderings of the Irish, a saint inspiring veneration throughout the modern Catholic Church loc: 6123   

In puzzling out how the situation might become fruitful, the bishops realized that the Church could be rooted in Irish society by founding monasteries and nunneries.17 loc: 6132   

monasteries became part of the joint estate of great families. As a result, there grew a network of Christian communities intimately involved in the life of each local dynastic grouping, fostering Christian life throughout the island all the more powerfully because monasteries were so enmeshed in the pride and pre-Christian traditions of each tuath. loc: 6137   

reflecting the itinerant character of much of Irish society, the Church developed the peculiar phenomenon of roving ecclesiastical families, in whom priesthood and care of churches descended from one generation to another; loc: 6140   

Celtic Christian culture made a great deal of such sacred objects in its devotion. loc: 6148   

capable of having contacts with Syrian or Egyptian Christians, at least through books which had started life at the furthest margins of the Byzantine Empire and had been brought west. loc: 6154   

These unpredictable links between the Middle East and furthest western Europe produced a Celtic theology which resonated at whatever distance with the tradition of Origen and Evagrius. loc: 6163   

importance of humans striving as best they could towards perfection. loc: 6166   

The Irish clergy developed a series of ‘tariff books’ for their own use. These were based on the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness. loc: 6170   

the first ‘penitentials’ or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks. loc: 6174   

became the basis of the medieval Western Church’s centuries-long system of penance: loc: 6176   

whole system directly contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace, and that was to become an issue which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation, loc: 6178   

Columbanus’s first journeys (probably in the 580s) were into Christian Gaul, where his foundation of monasteries was met with less than wholehearted gratitude by the existing episcopate. loc: 6189   

a campaign of renewal addressed to the wider and older Christian world which had originally fostered Irish Christianity. He could do this, of course, because of that foundational Celtic Christian decision to keep Latin as the language of its public worship and its Bible. loc: 6194   

other Celtic monks extended his initiative still further by taking Christianity beyond the ghost of the imperial frontier into northern Europe. loc: 6204   

a party of monks and priests set out from Rome on the Pope’s command; they were bound for the Atlantic Isles under the leadership of a monk from Gregory’s monastery of St Andrew, called Augustine. loc: 6206   

the new Bishop Augustine recognized reality and established himself in the extreme south-east in Kent, the nearest kingdom to mainland Europe, where pagan King Ethelbert had married a Frankish Christian princess called Bertha, and where there was still a lively sense of the importance of the Roman past. The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury. loc: 6221   

Bede, a Northumbrian monk who lived a century after Augustine’s mission (c. 672-735). Bede was the greatest historian of his age in all Europe, perhaps the greatest for many centuries either side of his own time. loc: 6232   

a large proportion of Gregory’s attention is taken up with discussing sex - to be more specific, ritual impurity. loc: 6245   

Only a few decades before the arrival of Augustine, the balance of power through lowland England had still been not with Saxon warlords but with Celtic British. Certainly the British population had not been wiped out or driven to the far west, as historians have often in the past assumed, but had stayed put, while proving rather more able and willing to learn Anglo-Saxon than the Anglo-Saxons were capable of learning Celtic languages (plus ça change).32 Many of these Britons would be Christian to some degree: Christianity did not come as a startling novelty to the inhabitants of lowland England in 597. loc: 6251   

So what was different about Augustine’s mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience. loc: 6256   

OBEDIENT ANGLO-SAXONS AND OTHER CONVERTS (600-800) loc: 6257   

Augustine’s missionary party tried to turn Canterbury into Rome and Kent into Italy. loc: 6258   

Gregory sent Augustine a special liturgical stole, the pallium, a piece of official ecclesiastical dress borrowed from the garments worn by imperial officials. The gift was therefore a sign of subordination: Archbishops of Canterbury should receive their power from Rome ever after. loc: 6265   

Anglo-Saxon kings must have been influenced by the fact that Christianity was the religion of the Franks, who under the Merovingian successors of Clovis had emerged as the most powerful and admired of all the political units founded by Germanic migrants.35 loc: 6271   

By the tenth century, out of the diversity of these Christianized Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged one of the most coherent political units in Europe, a single monarchy of England, with a precociously centralized government loc: 6283   

The ideology of this remarkable kingdom was fuelled by the way in which Bede had depicted a single race called the English; his book, after all, was called ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the gens Anglorum’ - ‘people of the Angli’. Bede gave this ‘people’ a pride in their common and special identity, paradoxically based on their common loyalty to Rome. Pope Gregory I rather than Augustine is the hero of Bede’s tale of the conversion of the English. loc: 6285   

it was two centuries after Gregory’s death before Rome caught up with his cult, enshrining the Pope alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as one of the ‘Big Four’ theologians of the earlier West, the four Latin Doctors.39 loc: 6292   

Bede’s narrative reflected the fact that the Church in England had already secured its unity under Roman obedience before the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms united. loc: 6298   

England’s links to a wider world were overwhelmingly thanks to the Church. loc: 6307   

Because it maintained a loyalty to Rome untypical in the rest of Europe, that sense of difference enhanced a precocious belief among the English in their special destiny among their neighbours, both in the same islands and among the people of Europe. loc: 6310   

Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Christians between them made the Atlantic Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries a prodigious powerhouse of Christian activity. loc: 6322   

Their activities coincided with and were aided by an expansion of Frankish power north and east, into what are now the Low Countries and the territories of Germany loc: 6325   

a people or a community ‘accepted’ or ‘submitted to’ the Christian God and his representatives on earth. This was language which came naturally: groups mattered more than single people, loc: 6346   

Most people expected to spend their lives being given orders and showing deference, so when someone ordered dramatic change, it was a question of obeying rather than making a personal choice. Once they had obeyed, the religion which they met was as much a matter of conforming to a new set of forms of worship in their community as of embracing a new set of personal beliefs. loc: 6347   

most evangelists were what we would call gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom, loc: 6352   

Above all, Christians everywhere had a big advantage in being associated with the ancient power that obsessed all Europe: imperial Rome. The Latin-speaking Church became a curator of Romanitas, Romanness. loc: 6353   

The eighth and ninth centuries were a period in which the papacy was intent on asserting its dignity and special place in God’s purpose, loc: 6374   

papal contacts with Byzantium could be regarded as consolidating: eleven out of eighteen popes in the period 650-750 had a Greek or Eastern background.49 There was still a sense among ordinary Christians and ordinary clergy that they were part of a single Mediterranean-wide Church. loc: 6377   

One long-standing cause of theological alarm in Rome was neutralized in 680-81, when Constantinople hosted yet another major council of the Church (reckoned as the sixth held there). It finally reaffirmed the imperial Church’s commitment to the decisions of Chalcedon against any attempt to placate Miaphysites in the empire, ending the so-called ‘Monothelete’ controversy loc: 6382   

Such frictions meant that popes were alert for any signs of fresh doctrinal deviance in the East, and the eighth century soon brought them new alarms as the growing hostility to the devotional use of images - iconophobia and then iconoclasm - were promoted by successive Byzantine emperors loc: 6390   

By contrast to the high-handed Easterners, with their fitful regard for Roman sensibilities, popes were well aware of the fund of goodwill towards the see of Peter in northern Europe, exemplified by no fewer than four Anglo-Saxon reigning monarchs who, between the seventh and ninth centuries, successively undertook the long journey to Rome. loc: 6394   

CHARLEMAGNE, CAROLINGIANS AND A NEW ROMAN EMPIRE (800-1000) loc: 6403   

In Francia, two and a half centuries of Merovingian Christian monarchy sputtered to an ignominious close in 751, when the titular and already powerless Merovingian King Childeric III was informed that he and his son had discovered a religious vocation, loc: 6404   

The kingship of Pippin was a wholly illegitimate break with historic succession and, like David’s coup d’état against Saul long before in Israel, it needed all the boosting it could get from divine power and sacred place. loc: 6412   

Pippin paid especial devotion to the Merovingian royal saints, Martin of Tours and Denis, thus annexing that intimate relationship between dynasty and sanctity, loc: 6415   

Pippin and Carloman thus linked the fortunes of their new political venture to major changes and reforms in the Church, particularly in backing great monastic communities who housed their powerful long-dead saintly allies. loc: 6421   

Chrodegang, a great aristocrat and Merovingian palace official who, in the 740s, also became Bishop of Metz loc: 6425   

strict code of rules for the clergy of his cathedral church. loc: 6428   

Since the Greek word for a rule or measure is kanon, the word ‘canon’ became increasingly commonly applied to members of such regulated bodies of clergy in cathedrals or other major churches. loc: 6429   

In his celebration of Rome in Metz, Chrodegang was closely reflecting the aims of his patron in the new dynasty loc: 6439   

Pippin quickly won approval for his abrupt change of regime from Pope Zacharias, and Zacharias’s immediate successor, Stephen II (752-7), reaped the reward of this affirmation. loc: 6444   

King Pippin recaptured these lands, but he did not return them to imperial government: instead (to the fury of the Byzantines) he gave them to Pope Stephen. loc: 6447   

he had founded one of Europe’s most enduring political units, the Papal States of central Italy, loc: 6449   

successive popes now kept a permanent representative at the Frankish Court, just as they had long done at the imperial Court in Constantinople.57 loc: 6452   

Charles’s reign was long, 768 to 814, and history soon christened him Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus - Charlemagne.58 loc: 6457   

he was obsessed with ancient Rome - but also a Rome which was Christian: had he not himself sworn mutual oaths with the Pope in the very presence of Peter in the crypt of the Apostle’s basilica? loc: 6464   

Carolingian control over the new empire’s nobility was based on the rewards of plunder which successful campaigns could produce, loc: 6466   

Pope’s urgent need for political support from the most powerful man in western Europe. Leo was the only pope ever to kneel in homage to a Western emperor: his successors did not make the same mistake.60 loc: 6475   

Charlemagne now had no choice but to stress the role of his coronation by the Pope as the basis for his new imperial power. loc: 6484   

West, but, unlike Augustus, he posed as the defender of Christianity like the Byzantine emperor. He had no hesitation in confronting the Byzantines on theological matters. loc: 6491   

a major cause of misunderstanding and ill-will was the matter of iconoclasm (destruction of images), resulting in some aggressive statements against the Eastern Church loc: 6493   

troublesome addition to the Nicene Creed, the Filioque or double procession in the Trinity of the Spirit from Father and Son, loc: 6495   

his bishops defiantly defended it as orthodoxy loc: 6499   

the pope’s participation in the empire’s foundation had been a dramatic assertion of the papacy’s new self-confidence in its cosmic role, and it signalled the returning vitality of the Latin West. loc: 6504   

so-called Donation of Constantine. grants the Pope and all his successors not merely the honour of primacy over the universal Church but temporal power in the territories of the Western Empire, loc: 6513   

saw it as a manifesto for a world in which Christ’s Church would be able to rule all society. loc: 6517   

Nicholas I (858-67), loc: 6519   

collection emphasized the power of the pope to overrule or reverse any decision of a local Church council. loc: 6524   

suggested that the papacy could construct Church law for itself, without references to the deliberations of bishops gathered in general councils of the Church, loc: 6526   

Carolingian Renaissance loc: 6531   

monumental churches. loc: 6535   

imitated forms and plans of basilican churches from the early Christian past, loc: 6536   

overwhelm those approaching with ecclesiastical splendour and a sense of the beginning of a journey into a sacred interior; these were the first dramatic entrance façades loc: 6537   

massive programme of copying manuscripts, loc: 6541   

This ‘information explosion’ was the basis of an attempt to remodel and instruct society on Christian lines. loc: 6545   

Charlemagne pushed reform on the Church’s life and worship practice throughout his dominions. loc: 6550   

overwhelmingly the agents of reform and change in the Carolingian world were monks, and they were members of monastic communities with a particular formation, decided by the Rule which St Benedict had pioneered in Italy in the sixth century loc: 6560   

monks of Fleury had mounted an expedition far into the south of Italy, to Monte Cassino, and there they clandestinely excavated the body of Benedict himself, loc: 6566   

The possession of his bones in Frankish lands was a major reason why first the Franks and then other peoples who admired Frankish Christianity adopted Benedict’s Rule as the standard in monastic life. loc: 6570   

Carolingians were ruthless in annexing monastic patronage from their noblemen, in a bid to consolidate their power. Emperors and noblemen competed to endow Benedictine monasteries with estates to free the monks from financial anxiety.73 loc: 6575   

clergy brought these brutal politicians and warlords to a healthy sense of their own need for repentance and humility: loc: 6578   

ninth century was a decisive era in extending the penitential discipline brought by the Celtic monks in their missions to central Europe loc: 6595   

new regime of penitence caused a problem for Carolingian warlords. loc: 6600   

killing in war was still regarded as inherently sinful. loc: 6602   

they constantly had to fight to survive and gain wealth, but the price was drastic physical self-punishment. loc: 6603   

There was a solution: monasteries could use their round of prayer to carry out these penances on behalf of the noblemen and warriors who had earned them. loc: 6606   

the regular round of communal prayer demanded by Benedict’s Rule was an excellent investment for the nobility; loc: 6608   

The highest and most powerful form of prayer the Church could offer was the Eucharist. loc: 6610   

as laity sought the prayer of priests, they especially wanted the power of the Mass. loc: 6614   

Monks had rarely been ordained priests in earlier centuries, but now they were ordained in order to increase the output of Masses in a monastic community. loc: 6616   

Now it commonly became a spoken service, the ‘Low Mass’, to be said as often as possible, loc: 6618   

side altars began multiplying in Charlemagne’s abbey churches, so that many Low Masses could be said alongside the sung High Mass which remained the centrepiece for the whole community at the high altar.79 loc: 6619   

Western Church began adapting its Latin liturgy to provide Masses which would give particular mention of the dead, for use at the time of a burial, or at intervals of time thereafter. They came to be called ‘requiems’, loc: 6625   

Christian liturgy’s starkest presentations of human horror at death, judgement and damnation, loc: 6631   

Carolingian monasteries were not merely concerned with fighting sin and death; they were useful as a means of cutting down the numbers of claimants to a noble family’s lands. Send spare sons or daughters off to a convent, loc: 6638   

particularly valuable for women. loc: 6641   

royal abbesses loc: 6647   

Such royal princesses were invaluable in bringing a sacred character to their dynasties, now that kings were subject to the Church and could not fully play the role of cultic figures, as they had in pre-Christian religions.80 loc: 6655   

the ninth to eleventh centuries were a golden age for monasteries of the Rule; the survival of European civilization would have been inconceivable without monasteries and nunneries. loc: 6659   

The vision of order and regularity which the Benedictines represented was just what the rulers of the Carolingian age were looking for. loc: 6667   

the Capetian kings in Paris who ousted the last Carolingians in 987 clung with particular devotion to the great royal saintly cults of the Merovingian and Carolingian past as potential for strengthening their position. loc: 6677   

This steadily increasing stream of papal benevolence reflected the fact that the flow of benefit was not in one direction only. An exclusive relationship with a flourishing Frankish monastery was good for papal prestige and influence over the Alps, at a time when the reputation of individual popes was, to put it charitably, not high. These were dismal years for the Bishops of Rome, at the mercy of powerful families in their city and rarely rising above their difficult situation. loc: 6689   

While the papacy languished, the Western Roman Empire recovered. The idea of empire persisted through its years of weakness, and during the tenth century it was given political reality once more in the eastern part of the old Carolingian dominions by Emperor Henry I (919-36) and his successor, Otto I loc: 6703   

Ottonian dynasty did its best to imitate the achievements of the first Western emperor, inspiring a spectacular new burst of creativity in architecture, art and manuscript illumination. loc: 6706   

differences of theological outlook could fester: principally Charlemagne’s addition of the Filioque to the Nicene Creed loc: 6717   

This was a sign that papal relations with the East were reaching a low ebb.86 A formal break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 (see p. 374), not seen as significant at the time, signalled not simply a new era in relations between the two, but the culmination of a process in which the papacy made its claim to a primacy in the whole Church ever more formal. loc: 6721   

Topic: Chapter 11 The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200)

11 The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200) loc: 6726   

ABBOTS, WARRIORS AND POPES: CLUNY’S LEGACY loc: 6728   

Alfred’s successors Aethelstan (reigned 924-39) and Edgar (reigned 944-75) achieved the united English kingdom anticipated in the Church of Augustine’s mission and in the writings of Bede (see pp. 341-2). The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church. loc: 6745   

Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, loc: 6749   

His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII’s sixteenth-century dissolutions, were also monasteries, loc: 6751   

There was a vast amount of church-building, precisely because to rebuild a church building was regarded as a sacramental sign of institutional and devotional renewal in the Church: loc: 6773   

Worship in the church of Cluny itself was renewed in spectacular style loc: 6777   

Western Europeans marvelled at this offering to God, and when they hastened to imitate it loc: 6779   

demanded that each foundation should form part of a new international organization run by the abbot of Cluny himself, as ‘priories’ to his abbey: they would form a Cluniac ‘Order’ loc: 6781   

From all over Europe, devout people now sought to make the long and difficult journey to the remote Iberian city, and Cluny, strategically placed in Burgundy, began organizing these crowds along the roads of Europe; its priories were agencies and way stations for the journey. The Compostela pilgrimage was only the flagship in a great industry of travel to holy places in Europe which blossomed during the eleventh century. loc: 6787   

In the early medieval period, the chief way of gathering wealth was by warfare, yielding plunder and slaves; as we have seen, as late as the Carolingian period kings survived by giving handouts to their warlords (see p. 349). By the eleventh century this system was coming to an end. The change was symbolized by the collapse of Carolingian central authority in much of Europe over the previous century, loc: 6802   

gradual end to the wave of invasions of non-Christian peoples from north and east loc: 6806   

In a search for new sources of wealth, and with the prospect of greater stability in their territories, the nobility turned to squeezing revenues out of the lands which they controlled through more productive farming. Some of their enterprise was directed to expansion of cultivation - draining marshes, clearing forest - but whether in old or new farming communities, they regulated their land and the people on it ever more closely. loc: 6809   

A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.4 loc: 6813   

Economic productivity dramatically rose as a result. There were better food supplies and more wealth. Surplus wealth and the need for ready exchange in which to transfer it meant that money became a more important part of the economy than it had been for centuries. Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, loc: 6815   

Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succumbing to Christian missions, loc: 6819   

around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia - first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king, Harald Blue-tooth, loc: 6821   

nobility of Germany began casting covetous eyes on the non-Christian lands to their north-east around the Baltic, loc: 6823   

pay more attention to the needs and obligations of the humble and the relatively poor. loc: 6826   

backbone of the early medieval Church had been the select group of monarchs and nobility loc: 6826   

Church now spread its pastoral care throughout Europe in a dense network of what it called parochiae: parishes. Each of the new villages was expected to have a church. The ideal of a parish was a territorial unit which could offer literally everyday pastoral care for a universally Christian population; loc: 6828   

The parish system covering the countryside gave the Church the chance to tax the new farming resources of Europe by demanding from its farmer-parishioners a scriptural tenth of agricultural produce, the tithe. loc: 6835   

clergy also became more alert to the possibilities of sin which wealth produced, and sought to protect their people from the consequences. It was during the twelfth century that avarice and the taking of interest on money (usury) became major themes loc: 6840   

extension of the clergy’s pastoral care in the parishes as leading to a profound shift in the Western Church’s theology of salvation and the afterlife. loc: 6843   

The instinct for justifying salvation by human effort, a constant thread from Origen through Evagrius and John Cassian, emerged once more to confront the ‘grace alone’ theology of Augustine. loc: 6850   

Penance could be done in this middle state, which was time-limited, and which moreover had only one exit, not to Hell but to Paradise. By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory. loc: 6853   

One symptom of the reorganization of society’s wealth was a great deal of local warfare as rival magnates competed to establish their positions and property rights, or used violence against humble people in order to squeeze revenue and labour obligations from them; this was the era in which a rash of castles began to appear across the continent, loc: 6857   

excommunication and bullied those present into swearing an oath to keep the peace. loc: 6862   

So a ‘Peace of God’ movement was born throughout the Frankish dominions and beyond, east of the Rhine and south of the Pyrenees; eventually it even included a set of agreements about which days were legitimate for fighting. loc: 6864   

THE VICAR OF CHRIST: MARRIAGE, CELIBACY AND UNIVERSAL MONARCHY loc: 6873   

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it did its best to gain more control over the most intimate part of human existence, sexual relationships and marriage; increasingly Church councils convened as part of the Peace movement began making orders which had nothing directly to do with peace, but regulated people’s private lives.9 loc: 6876   

successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: loc: 6879   

Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been instituted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. loc: 6880   

sacramental view of marriage meant that the Western Church saw a union blessed in Church as indissoluble; loc: 6884   

Church much extended the number of relationships of affinity between relatives which could be considered incestuous and therefore a bar to marriage; loc: 6888   

another response to the new arrangements which were emerging for land ownership in eleventh-century society. loc: 6896   

A new custom of ‘eldest takes all’ (primogeniture) became widely established by the twelfth century, and now the nobility could see the Church and its concern for legitimate marriage as a helpful clarification to identify the true heir under the law of primogeniture. loc: 6898   

Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property, just as secular lords were doing at the same time. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. loc: 6904   

Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope’s residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid. loc: 6906   

at a time when everyone was being called to be holy, celibacy guaranteed that clerics still stole a march in holiness on laypeople. loc: 6909   

and occasionally deeply scandalous sequence of popes was replaced in Rome by successive capable and strong-willed reformers, loc: 6919   

Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049-54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread. loc: 6929   

the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (azyma in Greek) at the Eucharist. Azyma had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, loc: 6932   

Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. loc: 6934   

Pope and Oecumenical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, loc: 6940   

The pope who drew together all the strands of papal self-assertion in the eleventh century was Gregory VII (reigned 1073-85). loc: 6943   

a series of formal statements entered into his administrative register, was centred on a definition of the pope as universal monarch in a world where the Church would reign over all the rulers of the earth.18 loc: 6946   

excommunicate the king and future Emperor Henry IV in the course of an ‘Investiture Controversy’, loc: 6951   

Gregory’s successors took a new title, more comprehensive than ‘Vicar of Peter’, more accurately to express his ideas: ‘Vicar of Christ’. loc: 6956   

dispute between King Henry II of England and his former Chancellor the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, about whether the King’s newly developing royal legal system could claim full jurisdiction over English clergy, at a time when the Church’s canon law was far more comprehensively developed. loc: 6963   

A universal monarchy, however notional, needed a complex central bureaucracy. The popes had earlier built up a permanent staff of assistant clergy, cardinals. They were so called from the Latin cardo, meaning a wedge rammed between timbers, loc: 6974   

Like every other European monarch, the Bishop of Rome found that he needed a Court (Curia); this would not only provide him with more personal and less independent attendants than the cardinals had become, but would also meet the ever-growing demand from the faithful of Europe that the pope must do business for them. So in the 1090s the crusader-pope, Urban II, formalized structures for his Curia which became permanent. loc: 6979   

Rome’s newly imposed importance in the everyday life of the Church meant that it was worth making the long journey there. loc: 6982   

Naturally the unified Church of Gregory’s reforms needed a single system of law by which universal justice could be given, and the twelfth century was the first age when this began to be put in systematic form as canon law. loc: 6989   

a great stimulus was the rediscovery in Italy around 1070 of two copies of a compilation of imperial law, the great Digest of Roman laws ordered by the Emperor Justinian (see pp. 433-4); this prompted a flourishing of legal studies loc: 6991   

The chief collection of existing laws and papal decisions which codifies canon law comes from mid-twelfth-century Bologna, and goes under the name of Gratian, loc: 6994   

embodied of a pyramid of Church authority culminating in the pope. loc: 6998   

embodied that principle of the Gregorian Revolution that there were two classes of Christians, clerical celibates and laypeople. loc: 7000   

balance of local power in the Church between diocese and monastery was now tipping back in favour of bishops, after centuries in which abbots and indeed abbesses had characteristically been the leading figures loc: 7006   

bishops were increasingly trapped in a world of fixed routine - faced with demands from pope and lay rulers, and remote figures to their flocks. loc: 7011   

between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the cathedrals of Latin Europe were rebuilt on a huge scale, loc: 7018   

‘the age of the Cathedrals’.28 loc: 7020   

architects began tackling the technical challenge of engineering buildings which would reach to Heaven loc: 7028   

Light in the churches of the Gothic architectural tradition was filtered through windows which were increasingly themselves huge sequences of pictures in stained glass, loc: 7039   

church towers and pointed steeples which rose triumphantly higher than any other man-made structure in Catholic Europe; loc: 7049   

THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES ( 1060-1200) loc: 7069   

Cluny was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power. loc: 7072   

order allied itself closely with the Christian kings of León-Castile and Aragon-Navarre who were winning victories against the Muslims. loc: 7078   

now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. loc: 7084   

Christian warfare could actually be seen as the means to win salvation. loc: 7087   

1009 the mentally unstable Caliph al-Hâkim of Egypt ordered the systematic demolition of Constantine’s Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. loc: 7088   

growth in pilgrimage, but especially by the opening up of a new land route to Jerusalem via Hungary, which meant that more and more people witnessed the damaged site.34 loc: 7091   

great victory in the central Mediterranean, in the island of Sicily, which had been contested between Muslims and Christians since the early days of Islam. The victorious armies were led by warriors whose ancestors had come from the north, loc: 7094   

Normans. loc: 7096   

in Sicily they made spectacular conquests from 1060, setting up a Norman kingdom there which was to prove one of the most productive frontiers of cultural exchange between Byzantines, Muslims and Catholic Christians in the Mediterranean world. loc: 7107   

Norman seizure of Sicily as a precedent for the greater campaign for the Holy Land itself.36 loc: 7111   

direct appeal for military help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. loc: 7118   

Urban described renewed but completely imaginary atrocities against Christian pilgrims by Muslims in Jerusalem, loc: 7120   

The effect was sensational: loc: 7121   

excited by the Pope’s promise that this was a sure road to salvation. loc: 7126   

papal grants associated with this promise were the origins of the system of indulgences, loc: 7127   

those raised by a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit. As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity’s first large-scale massacres of Jews, loc: 7131   

Muslims were bewildered at the sudden incursion of Western Europeans into the Middle East. loc: 7140   

Ironically, as we will see, one of the most permanent achievements of the crusaders was fatally to weaken the Christian empire of the East. loc: 7155   

commissioned a picture of the end of time in which Christ himself was portrayed as a warrior on horseback. loc: 7162   

in the wake of the First Crusade there emerged monastic orders of warriors dedicated to fighting on behalf of Christianity, loc: 7166   

Between 1307 and 1312, the entire Templar Order was suppressed, once it was clear that the Templars had no chance of contributing to a reconquest of the Holy Land. It was an understandable reaction both to their failure and to the apparent lack of purpose of their continuing wealth and power in estates which extended not merely through the eastern Mediterranean but as far west in Europe as Dublin. Admiring eleventh- and twelfth-century monarchs and noblemen had provided all these lands; now their descendants were inclined to feel that this had not been a wise investment. loc: 7173   

A further military order, the Teutonic (that is, German) Knights, was alarmed by the fate of the Templars and reinvented itself after the Middle East defeats of the thirteenth century, relocating to northern Europe loc: 7184   

fight against Europe’s last surviving non-Christian power in Lithuania. loc: 7186   

The order created a series of colonies around the Baltic Sea which were as much culturally German as they were Christian, won at the expense of Christian Poland as well as of Lithuania. loc: 7189   

the essence of Cathars’ beliefs was dualist; they believed in the evil of material things and the necessity to transcend the physical in order to achieve spiritual purity. loc: 7198   

may be that Catharism sprang from Latin contacts set up with Bogomils in Constantinople during the First Crusade. Certainly contemporaries made the connection with the East: the English word ‘bugger’ is derived from ‘Bulgarian’, and reflects the common canard of mainstream Christians against their opponents that heresy by its unnatural character leads to deviant sexuality. loc: 7201   

The campaign to wipe out the Cathars soon turned into a war of conquest on behalf of the king and nobility of northern France. In its genocidal atrocity, this ‘Albigensian Crusade’ (the city of Albi was a Cathar centre, with its own Cathar bishop), ranks as one of the most discreditable episodes in Christian history; loc: 7206   

During the thirteenth century, the idea of crusade reached its most strained interpretation when successive popes proclaimed crusades against their political opponents in Italy - chiefly the Holy Roman Emperor and his dynasty - and in the end, when the papacy itself splintered, even between rival claimants to the papal throne. loc: 7210   

What still did galvanize people to support crusades was the continued reality of threats from Islam, and as late as the sixteenth century there was real popular enthusiasm for crusading ventures to the East along the shifting frontier of the two faiths, now creeping westwards in the Balkans. loc: 7215   

successful defence of Belgrade against Ottoman Turkish armies in 1456, achieved by a combination of aristocratic-led armies and crowds of ordinary people aroused to fight for Christendom by charismatic preaching, loc: 7217   

in 1567 when the then pope abolished the sale (though not the principle) of the indulgences loc: 7220   

CISTERCIANS, CARTHUSIANS AND MARY (1100-1200) loc: 7224   

aristocratic ethos of the great monasteries, with their sprawling estates and hordes of servants? loc: 7229   

a large variety of new religious orders, seeking to change the direction of monasticism. loc: 7231   

An explicit return to Benedictine roots came in the Cistercian Order, loc: 7234   

they felt that contact with the sinful world had been their predecessors’ downfall, so they sought lands far from centres of population, in wildernesses. loc: 7236   

ruthlessness in the service of Christ is a mark of the militancy which the Cistercians brought to the religious life. loc: 7242   

their most formidable early representative, Bernard of Clairvaux, loc: 7244   

by basing the everyday work of their houses on teams of lay brothers sworn to a simpler version of the monastic rule than the fully fledged monks, they opened the monastic life once more to illiterate people. loc: 7253   

Another late-eleventh-century religious order made a permanent success of monastic simplicity: the Carthusians. Like loc: 7265   

rediscovery of the monasticism of the East which had provided the first models for Western monasteries. loc: 7268   

avoid the temptations to slackness which haunt every religious community is their resolve to preserve each monk in solitude in order to seek a greater intimacy with the divine. loc: 7269   

Augustinian movement, loc: 7281   

Their priestly duties took them to places where they could provide pastoral care for the laity, so they had precisely the opposite attitude to the world from the Cistercians. loc: 7286   

satisfied a universal hunger for the prayers of holy people. loc: 7288   

extraordinary degree of choice for a twelfth-century man or woman seeking to fulfil a monastic vocation, loc: 7292   

all their monasteries were dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. In this, the Cistercians were riding the crest of a wave which, in the era of the Gregorian reforms, had swept through all Europe. loc: 7300   

the rows in fourth-century Rome in which Jerome had championed Mary’s perpetual virginity (see p. 314).55 Such thoughts blossomed in the eleventh century, when various circumstances combined to promote and enrich Marian devotion. loc: 7305   

For Gregorian reformers, the ever-Virgin was the perfect example of the chastity which underpinned their new ideal of universal clerical celibacy, and naturally this theme particularly appealed to monks. Rather later, as the threat from the Cathars grew intense, Mary seemed, against Cathar dualism, to be a guarantor that God could sanctify created and fleshly things as much as he could the Spirit, since it was in Mary that the Word was made flesh. loc: 7307   

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. loc: 7315   

Immaculate Conception loc: 7318   

devotional belief current in both East and West that Mary’s flesh should not see the normal corruption of death, loc: 7322   

late 1150s, a mystically inclined nun in the Rhineland, Elizabeth of Schönau, experienced visions of Our Lady being taken into Heaven in bodily flesh. loc: 7324   

within a few years a manuscript best-seller all over Europe, loc: 7326   

Churches which did not possess any relic of any significance - that was particularly likely in northern Europe - could trump the competition simply by commissioning a statue of Our Lady, which with luck, divine favour, local enthusiasm or assiduous salesmanship might produce evidence of its miraculous power and become the focus of pilgrimage. loc: 7331   

Topic: Chapter 12 A Church for All People? (1100-1300)

12 A Church for All People? (1100-1300) loc: 7342   

THEOLOGY, HERESY, UNIVERSITIES ( 1100-1300) loc: 7343   

a growth of industry, particularly in manufacturing clothing, created a network of new towns, and the Church found it difficult to cope; its developing parish system and the finance on which the parish was based operated best in the more stable life of the countryside. loc: 7348   

Now many people found themselves faced with the excitement and terror of new situations, new structures of life; their uncertainties, hopes and fears were ready prey for clergy who might have their own emotional difficulties and quarrels with the clerical hierarchy. This has been a repeated problem for institutional Christianity in times of social upheaval. loc: 7349   

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. loc: 7352   

From at least the beginning of the thirteenth century, self-appointed leaders roamed Europe preaching that individuals could meet God through an inner light;…‘Brethren of the Free Spirit’ loc: 7370   

rapid development during the eleventh century of schools of higher education attached to certain notable cathedrals. It was in such settings that the systematic study of Christian teaching was first undertaken, generating an increasingly diverse literature that explored the problems and questions which the propositions of Christianity generated, loc: 7376   

This organized exploration was christened ‘theology’,…Peter Abelard loc: 7380   

in Italy, however, there were cities greater in size and wealth than anything in northern Europe and during the eleventh century they developed and financed their own schools. Their models were from outside the Christian world: they copied in a remarkably detailed fashion the institutions of higher education which Muslims had created for their own universal culture of intellectual enquiry,…lay-dominated character loc: 7387   

some northern European cathedral schools also developed into universities:…much used by popes when they needed specialist expertise to pronounce on a disputed question. This advisory role was a completely new development in Christianity, loc: 7391   

now Aristotle came to excite and inform those whose business was ideas. loc: 7395   

first influx came through the Spanish Christian capture of Muslim Toledo and its libraries in 1085, loc: 7400   

Aristotle and his analytical approach to the world, his mastery of logical thought, confronted the Platonism of Christian theologians. loc: 7403   

how to relate the work of reason to the revealed truths of Christian faith. loc: 7405   

‘scholasticism’: that is, the thought and educational method of the scholae, the new university schools. loc: 7409   

Scholasticism was disputatious, sceptical, analytical, and that remained the characteristic of Western intellectual exploration loc: 7411   

first reaction to the growth of heresy was to redouble repression, loc: 7417   

outbreaks of religious fervour which the Church authorities had done nothing to inspire and which they often found frightening and sought to suppress. loc: 7426   

identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 loc: 7429   

From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. loc: 7435   

A PASTORAL REVOLUTION, FRIARS AND THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL (1200-1260) loc: 7440   

In 1194 Dominic became a priest in a community in Osma in northern Spain, living under Augustine’s Rule; he was drawn into campaigns across the Pyrenees to win back southern France from the Cathar heresy. loc: 7444   

In 1215 he got official permission from one of the bishops in the area affected by the Cathars to start a new effort: a campaign of preaching in which he and his helpers would lead a life so simple and apostolic in poverty as to outdo the Cathars, and convince people that the official Church was a worthy vehicle for a message of love and forgiveness. loc: 7449   

his preachers would have the best education that he could devise to make even their simplest message intellectually tough. loc: 7451   

avoided holding property so that they would not build up wealth like the monastic orders; instead, they lived by begging from people in ordinary society loc: 7457   

recreating a form of monastic wandering loc: 7459   

life of begging made the friars very vulnerable to their public. They would have to be in constant contact with the people to whom they ministered, loc: 7464   

brilliant reputation as defenders of orthodoxy yet often as restlessly original thinkers. loc: 7467   

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. loc: 7469   

he took it as his divine mission to turn upside down the central obsession of his father’s world, the creation of wealth. The trigger was his attitude to lepers. loc: 7475   

Now he would gather together people who would strip themselves of all possessions and would be outcasts for Christ. loc: 7478   

he passionately affirmed that all created things - Brother Sun, Sister Moon - were good, sharing the goodness of God’s human incarnation in Christ. loc: 7482   

Francis is the first person known to have suffered stigmata, loc: 7483   

many of the followers who had flocked to his message were beginning to organize themselves into another religious order, demanding a structure and everyday leadership. loc: 7491   

Francis and his followers survived because they won the sympathy of one of the most statesmanlike of medieval popes: Innocent III (Pope 1198-1216). loc: 7507   

Few Christian leaders have had such a transforming effect on their world. loc: 7515   

This fourth Lateran Council embodied the Gregorian aim of imposing regulated holiness on the laity and ensuring uniformity in both belief and devotional practice. So the council ordered every Catholic Christian beyond early childhood to receive the eucharistic elements at Mass at least once a year (in practice usually only bread rather than both bread and wine), and prepare for that encounter through confession. loc: 7523   

extraordinary attempt to get everyone to scrutinize their lives, loc: 7527   

council therefore recommended one philosophical explanation for understanding the miracle of the Mass: it asserted that Christ’s ‘body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood’.15 This was the doctrine generally known as ‘transubstantiation’, loc: 7530   

couched in terms borrowed from the philosopher Aristotle, whose abstractions of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’, loc: 7537   

Breadness and wineness have gone in substance, but something more, by divine providence, has happened: divine corporal substance has replaced them. Accidents of breadness and wineness remain, loc: 7544   

it was responding to and seeking to regulate a tide of devotion to the Eucharist which had already seized ordinary people. loc: 7547   

During the twelfth century (it is not clear originally where or when), a new liturgical custom became very common in the Mass. Clergy consecrating the eucharistic elements lifted high the bread and chalice of wine loc: 7547   

‘elevation of the host’ loc: 7550   

In 1208 Juliana of the nunnery of Mount-Cornillon near Liège first experienced a vision of Christ in which he urged her to seek the establishment of a feast entirely focused on his body and blood, the consecrated elements of the Eucharist - a celebration of the universal Christian celebration. loc: 7554   

papal decree by Urban IV in 1264, establishing her feast throughout the Church. loc: 7556   

feast was called Corpus Christi (‘the body of Christ’): loc: 7561   

during the fourteenth century Corpus Christi became one of the most important feasts of the Church, and inspired many lay associations (gilds) devoted to promoting and maintaining it. loc: 7564   

It was a way to express pride in community life and of course simply to have fun. loc: 7566   

In order to ensure uniformity of belief among the faithful, the Lateran Council created procedures for inquisitions to try heretics. loc: 7570   

aim was not merely to repress, but to change society for the better loc: 7574   

major part of an inquisition’s task was always to impose penances, loc: 7575   

Carmelites started their existence as an informal group of hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, probably as refugees when Jerusalem was first recaptured by the Muslims in 1187. Conditions grew impossible for them when the whole kingdom collapsed, so they migrated westwards loc: 7592   

inventing an even more exotic origin, in the time of the Prophet Elijah, a much earlier enthusiast for Mount Carmel. Thus they became the only religious order ever to claim a pre-Christian past, loc: 7595   

because they kept their collective memory of contemplation on Mount Carmel, they brought to the West a love of wilderness which the Cistercians had at first possessed but were already losing. Carmelites appreciated the aesthetic beauty of wild nature with a relish which anticipates later European romanticism. loc: 7605   

The beauty of the elements, the starry heavens and the planets ordered in perfect harmony, invite us to contemplate infinite wonders loc: 7609   

Carmelites later had their donors create wildernesses for them, not to farm but simply for contemplation: the first wild gardens or sacred theme parks.21 loc: 7613   

Dominicans and Franciscans treated him as unwelcome competition; a major council of the Church at Lyons in 1274 decided to suppress ‘all forms of religious life and the mendicant Orders’ founded after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. loc: 7618   

His movement split between those who wished to remodel the order to make it more like the Dominicans, and ‘Spirituals’ who wished to reject all property, and by implication all ordered society, on the basis that Christ and his Apostles had no private possessions - that nagging truth embedded in the Gospels, which the Apostle Paul had first considered a problem loc: 7624   

Joachim of Fiore, whose broodings on the course of human history had convinced him that it was divided into three ages, dominated in turn by Father, Son and Holy Spirit; he thought that the third Age of the Spirit would begin in 1260 and would see the world given over to the monastic life.23 loc: 7628   

eventually Pope John XXII, a strong-minded and not always admirable cleric, was driven in 1318 to condemn the Spirituals as heretical. loc: 7636   

Those Franciscans who escaped destruction continued to quarrel with each other about the interpretation of their founder’s message of poverty, and it has been a characteristic of Franciscan community life that breakaway orders have continued to be founded to make a particular point about this. loc: 7641   

Like the Dominicans, Franciscans became deeply involved in the universities, loc: 7649   

Unlike most monastic orders, friars welcomed laypeople into their communities for spiritual counsel and discussion, loc: 7651   

THOMAS AQUINAS: PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH loc: 7656   

Aquinas took as the ground of his work that the systems of thought and reasonable analysis presented by Aristotle did not deny the central place of faith, but illustrated, perhaps even proved, its truths. Aristotle’s categories and discussion of ‘forms’ reflected the nature of the humanity which God had created, which had its form in a rational soul and was naturally inclined to act with reason. Nothing should be proposed which is contrary to our reason; this is the path to truth which God has given us, loc: 7667   

Building on Aristotle’s idea that everything created must have a cause from which it receives its existence, he could construct a system in which everything that is and can be described is linked back in a chain of causation to God, the first cause of all things. loc: 7674   

what this greatest of scholastic theologians understood was that all language about God had to employ the sideways glance, the analogy, the metaphor. So Aquinas’s judgements on truth are presented as a summary of probabilities, of the balance of arguments: loc: 7686   

‘reservation of the Blessed Sacrament’: part of the eucharistic bread consecrated in the Mass was ‘reserved’ from the service, and housed in a safe place, a ‘tabernacle’, enhanced in churches by ever more magnificent decoration and canopy work. Soon the reserved bread became known in common parlance simply as ‘the Sacrament’. In its tabernacle (often also called the ‘Sacrament House’) it was available for worshippers to use as the focus for their adoration whenever they wished, and it became a popular custom for clergy to gather the devout in front of the tabernacle, to lead them in devotional prayer. loc: 7696   

it became the focus and main actor in its own service, known as Benediction. In the most elaborated form of Benediction, the priest or deacon, splendidly vested, brings the consecrated bread out of its tabernacle and uses it to bless the worshippers before him. loc: 7701   

There can be no more powerful embodiment of the Western doctrine of Christ’s ‘Real Presence’ in the eucharistic elements than this service of Benediction. loc: 7705   

LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE: PERSONAL DEVOTION AFTER 1200 loc: 7717   

conditions of life for most people were worsening, loc: 7719   

thirteenth century saw the flowering of a distinctively Western devotional pattern which concentrated on God as person, actively intervening in his creation, and on a more personal exposition of the human reality of Christ and his Mother. loc: 7723   

after 1200, within this pattern of search for the divine, there was a greater concentration on the specific details of the life and death of Christ. loc: 7730   

Aquinas built up a logical case (which not all will find convincing) that Christ’s physical pains in his Crucifixion were greater than any experienced by any other human being in history. loc: 7732   

rather than perceiving God as this self-sufficient divine being, Francis saw a person: his Lord. Again and again, Francis calls God ‘Lord God’ (Dominus Deus). The Lord enters agreements - covenants - with his people, just as he did with the people of Israel (see pp. 60-61). As his side of the bargain in covenanting, he acts, rather than simply is.32 His greatest action is in becoming truly human in Jesus Christ through his mother, Mary. Francis called people to see the ordinariness, the humanity, in Christ, in order that they could love and worship him better as God. loc: 7744   

Meditations on the Life of Christ to help a nun of the Franciscans’ associated Order of Poor Clares in her contemplation of Christ’s earthly life, presenting it as a series of eyewitness accounts interlaced with commentary and exhortation which all imaginatively extended the Gospel narratives, so that the reader might be inspired to imitate Christ in her or his own daily life. loc: 7752   

The Meditations were so pictorial in character (and manuscripts of the text so frequently full of illustrations) that they were one major stimulus to a newly individual and intimate sacred art which sought to transcribe a visual reality into painting or sculpture loc: 7763   

Franciscan devotional style - the celebration of the everyday proclaimed in Francis’s Christmas crib - was an inspiration for one of the first artists in the Western tradition to be remembered as an individual personality and to project a personal vision in his artistic achievement: Giotto. loc: 7766   

Infancy and Passion privilege the role of Mary, both in Christ’s birth and in her agony at his final sufferings. Once more, this Marian devotion was a development from popular twelfth-century devotional themes (see pp. 393-4) - but with a new element: it was in the later thirteenth century that Mary too became not a benevolent but distant monarch, a model for queen dowagers and empresses everywhere, but a wretchedly mourning mother (see Plate 30). Indeed from the early fourteenth century she was commonly depicted throughout Europe as ‘Our Lady of Pity’ or Pietà, cradling her dead son in her arms after he had been taken down from the Cross.35 loc: 7779   

Christ too was now first depicted in art not as a King in Majesty or serene Good Shepherd, but as the ‘Man of Sorrows’, with the wounds of his crucifixion exposed and his face twisted in pain. loc: 7784   

To dwell on Christ’s sufferings was liable to make worshippers turn their attention to those whom the Bible narrative principally blamed for causing the pain: the Jews. loc: 7787   

Augustine of Hippo had declared that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. They should therefore be allowed to continue their community life within the Christian world, although without the full privileges of citizenship which Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end. So Jews continued to be the only non-Christian community formally tolerated in the Christian West, but their position was always fragile, and they were excluded from positions of power or mainstream wealth-creating activities. loc: 7790   

It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe’s first mass expulsion of Jews when, in 1289, Edward I’s Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later. loc: 7800   

The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. loc: 7807   

Pope John XXII, loc: 7808   

1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. loc: 7809   

now proclaimed that any magical practices or contacts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. loc: 7812   

The most famous twelfth-century female mystic was Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess of Rupertsberg, loc: 7818   

women were now so attracted to a mode of spirituality which was independent of formal intellectual training, but in which mind and imagination sought out the hiddenness of God, beyond doctrinal propositions or the argumentative clashes of scholasticism. Such mystics reversed the normal priorities of Western spirituality, which privileges the positive knowledge of God and affirms what Christian teaching positively says about him, to join Easterners in privileging silence and otherness. loc: 7823   

The Cloud of Unknowing, goes beyond Aquinas in quoting that mysterious and subversive fount of Eastern spirituality, Dionysius the Areopagite, when he says that ‘the most godlike knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing’.40 loc: 7827   

mystic met God beyond the mediation of the male Church hierarchy, and in ways which can be remarkable metaphorical or imaginative appropriations of physical contact with the divine. loc: 7833   

emphasize the human vulnerability, frailty, virginity of the subject, but which also celebrate the capacity of this frailty to unite with the divine. loc: 7835   

such mysticism, springing from free choices by individuals which might owe little to the priorities of the Church authorities, attracted hostile attention from inquisitors. loc: 7844   

Eckhart, writing in vigorous and multi-layered German, introduced the idea that after abstracting the particular ‘this’ or ‘that’ and achieving ‘detachment’, Gelassenheit, the soul can meet God in the ‘ground’, Grunt, of all reality. There she can achieve an inseparable union with the divine, loc: 7849   

despite all this rich flowering of female spirituality, hardly any women were canonized (officially declared to be saints) in the two centuries after 1300. One of them was indeed Bridget, and the other her Italian contemporary and fellow visionary Catherine of Siena. loc: 7859   

Topic: Chapter 13 Faith in a New Rome (451-900)

13 Faith in a New Rome (451-900) loc: 7872   

A CHURCH TO SHAPE ORTHODOXY: HAGIA SOPHIA loc: 7874   

the Byzantine emperors and the ideal of Christian governance which they represented became the vital distinguishing force in the Churches later known as Orthodox, loc: 7883   

Orthodox Christianity prides itself on its faithfulness to tradition: its majestic round of worship, woven into a texture of ancient music, sustained with carefully considered gesture and choreography amid a setting of painting following prescribed artistic convention, can be seen as reflecting the timelessness of Heaven. loc: 7885   

peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, loc: 7889   

the hymns of hate remained, liturgical affirmations that there was one truth in Orthodoxy which had fought its way past a series of satanic temptations to error. loc: 7904   

The destruction of the empire in 1453 did not merely encourage the Church to cling fiercely to its evolved theological identity, denying that any other could be or had been possible; it also led Churches which escaped the catastrophe to reaffirm the role of sacred monarchy in the mould of Byzantium, loc: 7908   

Orthodoxy has to a remarkable extent been moulded round one single church building, loc: 7912   

This is the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, whose fabric has fared better than Cluny’s, but whose fate as a church converted to a mosque encapsulates the traumas of Orthodox history loc: 7914   

owes its present form to the partnership of a Latin-speaking boy from the Balkans and a former circus artist of dauntingly gymnastic sexual prowess: the Emperor Justinian I and his consort, Theodora.5 loc: 7915   

It was Justinian who presided over the fifth Council of Constantinople in 553 when it condemned the theological tradition of Origen, sought to intensify the Church’s rejection of the Dyophysites and in the process humiliated Pope Vigilius (see pp. 209-10 and 326-7); it was Theodora who provided patronage for those who secretly built up a Miaphysite Church hierarchy to challenge the Chalcedonians loc: 7922   

His lavish expenditure and his vigorous pursuit of frontier wars, and the attendant taxation to pay for them, had united the active citizens of Constantinople in fury against him. loc: 7932   

Theodora’s steely declaration to her husband that ‘Royalty is a fine burial shroud’ that steadied his nerve, loc: 7937   

dispatched troops to slaughter the Nika rebels and hack their way to the submission of the city.7 loc: 7938   

With extraordinary speed he commissioned his architect to obliterate the remains of the old church. Its replacement would serve as cathedral of the city and symbol of unity in his empire, as well as a perpetual warning to future unruly crowds loc: 7940   

congregational space for emperor, patriarch and people which felt as if it encompassed the long east-west axis of a conventional basilica. This was achieved by building a dome of breathtaking width and height, pierced around its base by a row of windows through which shafts of light transfixed the church interior below; loc: 7947   

What Hagia Sophia did do was decisively to promote the central dome as the leading motif of architecture in the imperial Church of the East and in those Churches which later sought to identify with that tradition. loc: 7955   

Those who looked up into the dome above a congregation would normally see the image of Christ the Ruler of All (the ‘Pantocrator’), in glory and in judgement. loc: 7968   

They could also gaze east, to the table where bread and wine were made holy, normally presided over by the images of Christ’s Mother, usually with her baby son, God made flesh. loc: 7969   

tiers representing rulers, saints, clergy, all in hierarchical but intimate relationship to God and Mary the Theotokos, were a constant assurance to the congregations who viewed them that God in his mercy allowed such intimacy to human beings. loc: 7973   

The Eucharist, by contrast, is timeless, reflecting the eternity of Heaven. It is that timelessness that the artistic schemes of the Orthodox Churches characteristically invoke - the only moment to which they point above the altar is the end of time, when Christ reigns in glory, the moment in which every Eucharist participates. loc: 7978   

Eastern Christians seem to have concluded that it was enough for worshippers to be present at the Eucharist without receiving bread and wine. This seems to have been a measure of the awe loc: 7983   

Laypeople’s reception of these elements became a very occasional, perhaps once-yearly, experience, loc: 7985   

The ordered worship of God was the means by which holiness could enfold everyone, under the protection of the great helmet of the dome above. loc: 7987   

The singing congregations were travelling towards holiness, protected in the fixed shape of the liturgy, bound into the processions which dominated not merely the drama of the Church but everyday life in the streets loc: 7991   

Worship in the Orthodox fashion came to propel first monks, then laypeople beyond the monasteries, towards an idea which over centuries became basic to Christian Orthodox spirituality: union with the divine, or theosis loc: 7998   

human society could be sanctified through the ministry and liturgy of the Church, loc: 8002   

make himself [Justinian] and the imperial Court the focus of a society where every public activity which formerly had been part of the non-Christian structure of the empire was now made holy and consecrated to the service of God. loc: 8004   • 

Justinian’s collections and abridgements were a deliberately Christian reshaping of the heritage of law from the empire, loc: 8007   

The people of Byzantium continued to call themselves ‘Romans’ (and that is also what the Arabs called them and their homeland of Asia Minor - Rhum), but they did so in Greek: loc: 8015   

The draining of what was Roman or non-Christian from New Rome was one of the irreversible effects of Justinian’s reign and its aftermath: in the century and a half from his death in 565, a new identity was created for society in the Eastern Empire which can be described as Byzantine. loc: 8018   

In 529 the Emperor closed the Academy of Athens, loc: 8022   

only Alexandria was left as a centre of ancient non-Christian learning until the Islamic conquest. loc: 8025   

education became more and more the property of Christian clergy and reflected their priorities. loc: 8026   

new sort of book became increasingly common: florilegia, which were collections of short extracts from complete works which would act as guides to a subject, loc: 8026   

hagiographies (biographies of saints, their miracles and the wonders associated with their shrines) became the staple fare of Byzantine reading.14 loc: 8029   

The world felt increasingly out of human control, and the best hope seemed to be found in the hairline cracks between Heaven and earth provided by sacred places and holy people. loc: 8031   

Byzantine Empire increasingly on the defensive on all fronts, loc: 8032   

in his preoccupation with defeating his enemies in east and west, Heraclius had missed the importance of the new invaders from the south, the Muslim Arabs. After the defeat of a Byzantine army in 636, all its southern provinces were soon lost, Jerusalem included. loc: 8040   

heirs of Heraclius did succeed in preventing the whole empire from being swallowed up. Constantine IV beat off Muslim armies from Constantinople itself in 678, saved by the city’s formidable walls and by the innovative use of a terrifying incendiary device known as ‘Greek fire’ loc: 8046   

a decisive move blocking westwards Islamic advance into Europe for centuries, loc: 8049   

from the 540s a major plague spread westwards through the empire and beyond, and it recurred right through to the eighth century. Population plummeted, loc: 8051   

This weakening of both Byzantine and Sassanian society by the plague must have been another reason why the Arabs found it so easy to overwhelm such large areas of mighty empires. loc: 8055   

BYZANTINE SPIRITUALITY: MAXIMUS AND THE MYSTICAL TRADITION loc: 8059   

Increasingly, the imperial Church chose monks to be bishops: loc: 8062   

nowhere else but a monastery to learn how to defend the faith, or discuss with spiritual men how to exercise pastoral care. loc: 8064   

clergy with no intention of hearing a call to either monasticism or the episcopate have customarily continued to follow the practice of the early Church; they have been married men with families, and minister to the laity in their local churches. loc: 8070   

St Catherine’s was home to one of the most important shapers of Byzantine monasticism: its abbot John of the Ladder loc: 8084   

a collection of sayings conceived as a guide for monks. Its metaphor of progress in the ascetic life through the steps of a ladder is a characteristic feature of Christian mysticism loc: 8087   

apatheia, passionlessness or serenity, as one of the main ladder steps into the union with the divine in theosis. loc: 8094   

Note: Cf stoicism & Buddhism

mourning is the beginning of a Christian’s divine joy: loc: 8097   

Note: Cf dukkha Edit this note

greatest theologian in the Byzantine tradition: Maximus or Maximos (c. 580-662), loc: 8100   

His writings could guide a monk in almost every aspect of his life - doctrine, ascetic practice, worship and the understanding of scripture - and all is suffused with Maximus’s constant return to the theme of union with the divine. loc: 8102   

‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ were in fact probably compiled in Syria around eighty years before Maximus’s time, by a Christian steeped in Neoplatonist philosophy, and moreover a sympathizer with the Miaphysites loc: 8108   

the career of Pseudo-Dionysius is remarkable: he is a constant presence behind the mystical writings of Orthodox Christianity, loc: 8110   

exploration of how divinity could intimately combine with humanity through a progress in purging, illumination and union. loc: 8113   

Dionysian theology was also Neoplatonic in its view of the cosmos as a series of hierarchies; it viewed these hierarchies not as an obstacle to God, but as the means of uniting the remoteness and unknowableness of God with the knowable particularity of lower creation, loc: 8116   

relationship between unknowable transcendence and the tiers of being which represented knowable divinity: loc: 8121   

all the cosmos was created to arrive at deification. loc: 8127   

For Maximus, the central moment in the whole story of the cosmos was the coming of the Word in Flesh, a union of uncreated and created, loc: 8129   

God’s creation contained multiple ‘words’, logoi, which were God’s intentions for his creation, and the source of differentiation behind all created things: God the One and Simple designed his creation in multiplicity and complexity, so ‘it is said that God knows all beings according to these logoi before their creation, since they are in him and with him; they are in God who is the truth of all’. Rational created beings were destined and commanded to move back to meet their God through their logoi.28 loc: 8132   

Maximus relished the approach to scripture that Origen had pioneered, seeing behind the veil of the literal meaning of the text a great sea of spiritual truths. loc: 8139   

To seek after these meanings was yet another pathway back to the Creator, and it was a path directed by love. Love ‘is the producer par excellence of deification’. By whatever route, the goal was ‘to become living images of Christ, or rather to become identical with him or a copy, or even, perhaps, to become the Lord himself, unless this seems blasphemous to some’.30 Repeatedly, Maximus referred to Christians as gods through grace.31 loc: 8141   

the Church’s liturgical ceremonies served as a chief means of deification: loc: 8147   

Maximus’s greatest eloquence was reserved for the communal drama which bound together clergy and laity. loc: 8151   

in order to accommodate the Miaphysites, they suggested that once these natures had thus met, the natures gained a unity of activity or will (energeia or thel̄ma). Maximus was one of the chief voices opposing this ‘Monenergism’ or ‘Monotheletism’. loc: 8156   

the incarnate Christ must have had a fully human activity and fully human will. loc: 8159   

he was as a man using his human will to obey his divine will. This was a bold claim, based on a largely novel vision of the will as self-determination both rational and beyond conscious reason; loc: 8161   

increasing desperation of the imperial authorities to reap political benefits from their Monothelete compromise in the face of Arab military successes led them into brutal measures, not merely against Maximus but against Pope Martin (see p. 345); that did more to harm than help the Monothelete cause. loc: 8166   

The successful assertion of Christ’s human will is a theme which gives a human immediacy to the sufferings of the Saviour loc: 8169   

That conviction has strengthened many in the varied sufferings of Orthodoxy in later centuries.34 loc: 8171   

SMASHING IMAGES: THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY (726-843) loc: 8172   

a new setback for the empire as a sign of God’s disapproval: a move southwards by the Bulgars, another in that long sequence of peoples who had drifted westwards from central Asia to seek a home in Europe. In 680 loc: 8174   

military commander whose grim persistence in the unending slog of protecting Byzantine frontiers earned him the imperial throne in 717 as Leo III. loc: 8179   

he had become impressed with one aspect of Muslim austerity, the consistent rejection of pictorial representations of the divine. loc: 8182   

Islamic iconophobia, hatred of images, confronted Byzantine iconophilia, and Islam seemed to be winning. loc: 8184   

apparent inability of wonder-working icons to achieve much against Arab armies, loc: 8188   

pre-Christian Greeks, as we have seen, regarded it as natural to portray the divine in human form, loc: 8192   

statement in the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses (the ‘Decalogue’) that ‘You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them’.36 loc: 8195   

Biblical commentators both Jewish and Christian noted that the prohibition on graven images is the longest and most verbose of the Commandments. Far from reinforcing its authority, that raised the possibility that it was not part of the foundation Commandments at all, but a subsidiary comment on God’s first Commandment and basic prohibition, loc: 8199   

renumber the Commandments. A renumbering would involve tucking the graven-image prohibition inside Commandment One, rather than making it a free-standing Commandment Two (that meant dividing up the Commandment against covetousness at the end of the sequence to preserve the number ten). This was the conclusion drawn by Augustine of Hippo, and in it he was followed by the entire Western Church down to the Reformation, loc: 8204   

firmly maintained his stance alongside the Jews on the question of their numbering; so the graven-image prohibition stood as Commandment Two. Self-evidently, this had not inhibited the Easterners from creating a wealth of sacred art, but what they did was to observe the Commandment to the letter: their figural art was characteristically not graven (that is, sculpted) but was created on flat surfaces loc: 8214   

regarded as pure hypocrisy by the eighth-century iconoclasts, loc: 8223   

Iconoclasts said that we meet holiness in particular situations where the clergy represent us to God, such as in the Church’s liturgy, so icons are at best irrelevant; they argued that icons cannot be holy, as no specific prayer of blessing is said over them by a cleric loc: 8230   

nothing else to offer those for whom the liturgy had become impossibly grand and remote to satisfy every spiritual need. loc: 8234   

Iconophiles had more to offer. They thought that no officially sanctioned initiative is needed to bring something into the realm of the holy: the sacred can be freely encountered by everyone, because all that God has created is by nature sacred. Everyone can reach God through icons whenever they feel that God calls them. loc: 8235   

the little wooden tablets could take refuge in the privacy of people’s homes, loc: 8238   

icons and their defence became associated with holy men who might owe little to the Church hierarchy and its compromises with the emperor’s wishes: loc: 8241   

iconoclast emperors of the eighth century enjoyed a run of luck in their military campaigns, which must for the time being have vindicated their policies. loc: 8254   

What is also clear is the high level of destruction; there are very few surviving icons in the Byzantine world dating before this period, loc: 8260   

iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. loc: 8263   

deep offence in Rome, loc: 8263   

provoked much anger, bitterly dividing Byzantium during its continuing military emergencies. It is not surprising that monks were prominent in the iconophile opposition, because Constantine V was not merely a vigorously opinionated man, passionately fond of secular theatre and music, but he was also contemptuous of the monastic way of life. loc: 8264   

John of Damascus loc: 8270   

John proved one of the most damaging propagandists against iconoclasm: he was among the acutest minds of his day, a philosopher formidable enough to stir intense admiration much later in Thomas Aquinas. loc: 8273   

he treasured images of all sorts, verbal and visual. They illuminate and intensify our vision of God, and indeed in relation to God they are essential, because of the ultimately unknowable quality of God. loc: 8278   

balance between the human and the divine in Christ as showing how the divine could inter-penetrate the created: ‘The divine nature remains the same; the flesh created in time is quickened by a reason-endowed soul. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with His grace and power.’49 loc: 8282   

separated a usage between absolute and relative worship. Latreia, worship as adoration, is appropriate only when offered to God; the veneration appropriate to God’s creations is proskyn̄sis, loc: 8287   

Such created things ‘are truly called gods, not by nature, but by adoption, loc: 8289   

It was proskyn̄sis which the worshipper at home or in church offered to an icon.50 loc: 8290   

Constantine V might nevertheless have carried the day and set patterns for his successor had it not been for the intervention of the Empress Irene, widow of his son Leo IV. Irene became regent for her son Constantine VI loc: 8298   

she took the initiative in convening a council to authorize images once more. loc: 8302   

when the twenty-six-year-old Emperor Constantine showed signs of wishing to exercise real power, she ordered him to be blinded in the same palace chamber where she had given birth to him, leaving her free to become the first sole-ruling empress in Byzantine history. loc: 8303   

Charlemagne was impelled to condemn the theology of the East which promoted images, and he authorized theological statements which minimized the value of images; loc: 8317   

A number of theologians with a background in Spain reacted to their closeness to the Islamic frontier in the same way as iconoclasts in the East, loc: 8324   

iconophobic mood soon passed in the West, loc: 8335   

The medieval Western Church became as fixated on visual images as Easterners, and given its alternative numbering of the Ten Commandments, it had no inhibitions about continuing to develop a vigorous tradition of figural sculpture. loc: 8347   

It was only in the sixteenth century that Protestants who hated images rediscovered Claudius of Turin, the Council of Frankfurt and the Libri Carolini, and gleefully resurrected them loc: 8353   

Calvin was quick to exploit the sensational find. loc: 8356   

iconoclastic struggle resumed with even greater ferocity, loc: 8360   

fury of the iconophile party revealed that the Church’s reverence for the emperor remained conditional, even loc: 8362   

iconoclasm proved no more capable of delivering military success than the armies of Empress Irene. A particularly bitter blow came in 838 with the fall to Muslim armies of the major frontier city of Amorion in Asia Minor. The loss was long remembered in Byzantine folklore and song, loc: 8367   

Theodora as regent ordered the Patriarch Methodios to restore the icons to the churches. loc: 8372   

commemorated as one of the most significant feasts of the Eastern Church, the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. loc: 8373   

The two iconophile empresses had effectively closed down the possibility of alternative forms of worship in the Orthodox tradition. They made veneration of icons a compulsory part of it, an essential badge of Orthodox identity loc: 8378   

‘In the course of almost 180 years of debate, Greek theologians produced a radical change in the language with which they framed the icon. In so doing, they raised the status of the work of art to that of theology and the status of the artists to that of the theologian.’61 Art had become not a means of individual human creative expression, but an acclamation of the corporate experience of the Church. loc: 8387   

the Stoudite monastery became a laboratory for experiments with the ceremonies and texts of the worship from the monasteries of Palestine. Soon the liturgies used by monasteries, lovingly commented on in treatises by a sequence of monks from the time of Maximus the Confessor onwards, merged with the liturgy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia to create a liturgy for the whole Church.62 loc: 8405   

What the Palestinian monasteries offered the Church of Constantinople was a tradition of music and hymnody which has remained at the heart of Byzantine liturgy; loc: 8408   

soon adopted by the Carolingians and the Western Church as a whole to organize its musical composition and chant, and so they stand at the origin of the whole Western musical tradition.63 loc: 8411   

This slow liturgical dance through scripture means that, for better or worse, the Orthodox approach the Bible and its meaning with much less inclination to separate out the activity of biblical scholarship from meditation and the everyday practice of worship than is the case in the Western tradition. loc: 8433   

The ninth-century ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ should not obscure the fact that a very different strand of Christianity persisted both in the empire and to the east in the Armenian lands. loc: 8435   

dualist in belief, like gnostics and Manichees, loc: 8437   

theologies of a deep gulf between flesh and spirit. loc: 8439   

the new dualism looks independent of them too, and is first to be found in late-seventh-century Armenia. Their enemies gave them the contemptuous name Paulicians, loc: 8440   

Logically in view of their belief that matter was created by evil, the Paulicians despised fleshly aspects of imperial religion such as the cult of Mary or of a physical ceremony of baptism. Naturally they were also iconophobes - unlike the Byzantine iconoclasts, they extended their hatred to the Cross itself - and like the iconoclasts, they seem to have attracted soldiers to their beliefs. loc: 8445   

employed them on Byzantium’s Balkan frontiers, thus unwittingly spreading their message westwards. loc: 8449   

development in tenth-century Bulgaria of a further dualist sect, much more ascetic in character, known from the name of their ninth-century founder as Bogomils loc: 8451   

Bogomils rapidly spread through the empire, loc: 8453   

Bogomils seem to have been the inspiration for the similarly ascetic Cathars loc: 8455   

PHOTIOS AND NEW MISSIONS TO THE WEST (850-900) loc: 8466   

sudden expansion of mission west into central Europe, loc: 8469   

Photios was responsible for a literary work without parallel in the ancient world, a summary review of around four hundred works of Christian and pre-Christian literature which he had read in his first three decades of literate life - a feat of reading itself probably unparalleled at the time.70 loc: 8478   

Photios’s periods of patriarchal power coincided fruitfully with the coming of a succession of capable emperors who did much to restore the fortunes of the empire after two hundred years of miseries. loc: 8488   

Basil I and his successors patiently brought relative stability and even expansion beyond their frontiers, and notably they turned their main attention west rather than east, even though they also ably blocked further Islamic encroachments on the empire. loc: 8492   

the Byzantines were spurred to take a new interest in spreading their version of the faith as well as looking to extend their territories; there could be no better way of dealing with troublesome people on their frontiers such as the Bulgars than to convert them to Byzantine faith. loc: 8503   

The Byzantines could not tolerate such an alliance, and with the aid of a large army, they ensured that in 863 the Khan accepted Christian baptism at the hands of Byzantine rather than Latin clergy and took the baptismal name of the Byzantine Emperor Michael himself.75 loc: 8523   

Boris nevertheless continued to indulge in diplomatic bargaining with the bishops of Old and New Rome over the future jurisdiction of his new Bulgarian Church, producing a poisonous atmosphere which resurrected various long-standing issues of contention, such as the increasing Western use of the Filioque clause in the Nicene creed. loc: 8525   

Photios and Nicholas personally excommunicated each other over the Bulgarian question.76 loc: 8528   

two successive councils, meeting in Constantinople in 869 and 879, followed Khan Boris-Michael’s eventual inclination to put himself and his Bulgarian Church under Byzantine patronage; loc: 8532   

two councils had sealed the permanent extension of Christianity into one of the Balkans’ most powerful and long-lasting monarchies. loc: 8537   

Constantine and Methodios devised an alphabet in which Slav language usage could be accurately conveyed. loc: 8552   

Both alphabets were specifically intended to promote the Christian faith. They and the Christianized Slavonic language which they represented were to be used not simply to produce translations of the Bible and of theologians from the earlier centuries of the Church, but with a much more innovative and controversial purpose. They made it possible to create a liturgy in the Slavonic language, translating it from the Greek rite loc: 8565   

direct challenge to the Frankish priests working in Moravia, loc: 8569   

Frankish rivals to Methodios’s clergy were not forgiving and they forced the Byzantine missionaries eastwards until they took refuge in Bulgaria. loc: 8590   

From the Church’s Bulgarian centre in Ohrid (now in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), missionaries travelled west once more to reinforce Orthodox missions in a newly emerging kingdom, Serbia, and they took their grievances against Latin Westerners with them. loc: 8591   

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. loc: 8596   

establish the principle that the Greek language did not have a monopoly on Orthodox liturgy. loc: 8599   

The doctrinal disagreements and affirmations from the time of Justinian to the Triumph of Orthodoxy have (partly by dint of a good deal of selective writing of Church history) produced a profound sense of common identity across cultures. They are bound together by the memory of the worship in the Great Church in Constantinople, by a common heritage in the theology of such exponents of theosis as Maximus the Confessor, and by the final crushing of iconoclasm in 843. loc: 8606   

Topic: Chapter 14 Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700)

14 Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700) loc: 8617   

CRISES AND CRUSADERS (900-1200) loc: 8618   

The Macedonian emperors, who had been in power since 867, were very ready to employ mercenary soldiers who brought new tactics in warfare and helped Byzantium claw back territories long lost, as far east as Cyprus and Antioch of Syria. The Church of Constantinople was likewise expanding and self-confident. loc: 8628   

The recovery of nerve in society was nevertheless expressed in a vigorous affirmation of the institutions which had contributed to the Triumph of Orthodoxy and which now permanently shaped Byzantine religion. loc: 8640   

Court ceremonial could not be separated from that of the Church, since all Church festivals of any significance needed the imperial presence, loc: 8645   

The assertion of uniform values within the Orthodox Church and the new wealth in the tenth and eleventh centuries also led to a great investment in the institutions which had defended (or invented) the tradition so successfully in the years of conflict: the monasteries. loc: 8652   

the restlessness of the monastic spirit led to inspirational holy men moving out to find new wildernesses. This was a great age of colonization of ‘holy mountains’, loc: 8655   

Symeon’s conflicts with the Church authorities led him to some radical thoughts. He emphasized the tradition of his day that monks who were not ordained could offer forgiveness to penitents, as part of a wider theme that ‘ordination by men’ was not the same as appointment by God through the Holy Spirit loc: 8673   

The reign of the Emperor Basil II, later famed as ‘the Bulgar-slayer’ for his conquest of Bulgaria, ended after nearly half a century in 1025. A highly capable and energetic ruler who can be given the chief credit for the conversion of the Principality of Kiev to Christianity (see pp. 506-8), he seemed to have left the empire more secure than ever, but there was one fatal problem: he never married, and he failed to produce an heir loc: 8684   

For more than half a century, the empire was once more disrupted by contention for supreme power, and the lack of firm leadership spread insecurity into provinces only recently annexed, loc: 8687   

The most decisive battle in the Byzantine confrontation with the Seljuk Turks was at Manzikert in Asia Minor in 1071, at which the reigning Emperor Romanus was not only crushingly defeated, but suffered the humiliation of being taken prisoner. loc: 8696   

Asia Minor was increasingly undermined by Seljuk raids, and more and more territory passed out of Byzantine control. loc: 8699   

In 1081 the most successful of the imperial generals, Alexios Komnenos, seized power and established his dynasty on the throne, fighting on all fronts to save the empire from disintegration. As emperor, Alexios found that neither his family nor his army could be fully trusted in his struggles, and it may have been this insecurity which made him look beyond his frontiers for allies.7 He repeatedly appealed to Western leaders for help against various enemies, and in 1095 for the first time he was given a serious hearing. loc: 8701   

the arrival of large armies from the West in Byzantine territory was alarming and disruptive, while Latins rapidly began fomenting a self-justifying tale back home that the Byzantines were treacherously sabotaging their own heroic efforts. loc: 8709   

The worse the Latins behaved - and there was much worse to come - the more they peddled the notion that Byzantines were devious, effeminate and corrupt, loc: 8715   

The growing claims of the papacy to universal monarchy were offensive not merely to the Oecumenical Patriarch, but to any Eastern churchman, since the East had remained closer to the older idea of the collective authority of bishops throughout the Church. loc: 8718   

One symptom of the growing insecurity in the empire which went right back to the death of Basil II in 1025 was a new-found intolerance of any dissidence to the imperial Church. loc: 8726   

The first symptom of the new mood was a fatal weakening of the imperial policy of tolerance for Miaphysites in the eastern frontier provinces loc: 8729   

This same mood had surfaced in the anti-intellectualism of Symeon the New Theologian. How far could philosophy be of use to Christians? loc: 8740   

On the eve of Western Europe’s rediscovery of Aristotelian dialectic in scholasticism’s creative exploitation of Classical learning (see pp. 398-9), the Byzantine authorities were turning away from the same intellectual resources. loc: 8748   

with the death in 1180 of the great-nephew of Alexios, Manuel I Komnenos, after nearly four decades on the throne. Over the next half-century, the sequence of attempted seizures of power, rebellions and conspiracies came at a rate of around two a year.11 The chaos provided an obvious opportunity for the Balkan and central European provinces of the empire to rebel and break away. loc: 8751   

Even so, most of the various self-promoted rulers in the Balkans continued to look to Constantinople for cultural models to dignify their regimes, loc: 8756   

THE FOURTH CRUSADE AND ITS AFTERMATH (1204-1300) loc: 8761   

Venetians had been particularly energetic in securing trading privileges from the Byzantines. loc: 8763   

in 1201, there were plans for a new crusade: a consortium of Western European crusaders struck an ambitious deal with Venice to build them a fleet and transport them to attack Cairo. It loc: 8768   

not enough people turned up to fill the horrifically expensive array of ships. loc: 8772   

The Venetians were not going to lose their investment. They forced the crusaders uncomfortably camping out on the Lido to fulfil their bargain in a way that would suit Venetian interests. loc: 8773   

attacks on Constantinople in 1203 and 1204, horrible deaths in quick succession for a series of Byzantine emperors, including the little-regarded Alexios, the trashing of the Christian world’s wealthiest and most cultured city - in short, countless incentives for centuries of Orthodox fury against Catholics. loc: 8780   

the way lay open for an audacious new plan: the installation of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, a Latin Westerner, as Byzantine emperor, the distribution of large expanses of Byzantine territories to crusader lords, and the formal union of the Church of Constantinople with the Church of Rome. loc: 8783   

Drab practicalities began to occupy the Pope, notably the problem of looted relics - not so much the question of the ethics of looting them, as to how to authenticate them once they had arrived in Western Europe. Decree 62 of Innocent’s Lateran Council forbade sales and ordered (completely ineffectively) that all newly appearing relics should be authenticated by the Vatican.18 This flood of relics westwards affected all Europe. loc: 8795   

a fragment of the True Cross filched from the emperor’s private chapel in Constantinople, and a welcome stream of revenue from pilgrims followed.19 loc: 8800   

Latins had been expelled from Constantinople in 1261, loc: 8808   

painstaking reconstruction of Byzantine society, loc: 8810   

While the hated Latins still held ‘the City’, Byzantine leaders would have to rule from other cities of the shattered empire. loc: 8811   

It was eventually the rulers in Nicaea who recaptured Constantinople from the Latins in 1261. loc: 8817   

the Nicaean emperor actually drew on support from Venice’s bitter commercial rival Genoa in recapturing the city.22 loc: 8820   

during the thirteenth century that yet another issue was added to the sense of theological alienation between Greeks and Latins: the Western Church’s elaboration of the doctrine of Purgatory loc: 8832   

the empire’s political unity, that fundamental fact of Byzantine society from Constantine the Great onwards, never again became a reality. loc: 8837   

Michael VIII further infuriated a large number of his subjects by his steadfast pursuit of unity with the Western Latin Church, which he regarded not merely as a political necessity to consolidate imperial power, but as a divinely imposed duty. The hatred which his policy aroused pained and baffled him; the union of the Churches which his representatives carefully negotiated with the Pope and Western bishops at the Council of Lyons in 1274 was repudiated soon after his death.26 loc: 8842   

Orthodoxy beyond the Greeks could now fully emerge from the shadow of the empire which had once both created and constrained it. loc: 8846   

Both the newly consolidating Serbian monarchy and the Bulgarian monarchs (who were now calling themselves tsars, emperors) found it convenient to look to the patriarch in Nicaea for recognition of their respective Churches as autocephalous (self-governing). loc: 8850   

Although Sava and his father might be seen as having renounced worldly ambition in turning to the monastic life, their status as churchmen had a vital political effect on their country. The monastery of Chilandar became an external focus for the unity of the Serbian state and a symbol of its links with the Orthodox East. loc: 8858   

Sava’s immense spiritual prestige gave a continuing sacred quality to the Serbian royal dynasty loc: 8864   

ORTHODOX RENAISSANCE, OTTOMANS AND HESYCHASM TRIUMPHANT (1300-1400)

Orthodox identity was no longer so closely tied to the survival of a political empire, and it was increasingly a matter for the Church to sustain. loc: 8875   

This was a strange reversal of fortunes for patriarch and emperor. The patriarch was bolstered by financial support from rulers beyond the old imperial frontiers who were impressed at least by the resonance of such claims. The magnificence and busy activity of the patriarchal household and the Great Church in Constantinople looked a good deal less threadbare than the increasingly curtailed ceremonial and financial embarrassment of the imperial Court next door.30 loc: 8882   

Over the early fourteenth century, the empire briefly revived after 1261 descended into renewed civil war and loss of territory, both in the west to the expansionist Orthodox monarchy in Serbia and in the east to a new branch of Turkish tribes who had carved out for themselves a principality in north-west Asia Minor loc: 8893   

Ottomans extended their power through Asia Minor and the Balkans, overwhelming the Bulgarians and encircling Byzantine territory. More and more Orthodox Christians found themselves under Islamic rule, and in an atmosphere of increasing intolerance for their religion, loc: 8897   

It was in this age that one of the most familiar features of the Orthodox church interior arrived at its developed form: the iconostasis, a wall-like barrier veiling altar and sanctuary area from worshippers. loc: 8909   

the barrier is covered in pictures of saints and sacred subjects, in patterns which have become fixed in order and positioning. Customarily the wall does not reach the ceiling, so that the sound of the clergy’s liturgical chanting at the altar can clearly be heard above it and through its set of doors. It loc: 8912   

Because each icon in its theologically appointed place reveals and refracts the vision of Heaven, the iconostasis becomes not so much a visual obstruction in the fashion of the Western rood screen, but is actually transparent, a gateway to Heaven, like the altar beyond it. loc: 8934   

the iconostasis is the culmination of a set of steps which symbolize the ascent of the soul towards heavenly joy. loc: 8936   

basic to the structure is a central entrance - the ‘Beautiful Gates’ - which, when open, affords the sight of the altar, and which is flanked by smaller doors - again, of course, all appropriately bearing their icons. Outside the time of worship, the doors are closed. Open or closed, they mark punctuation points in the liturgy which retains the processional quality loc: 8940   

The Beautiful Gates are principally reserved for the bishop, the side doors used liturgically by deacons loc: 8942   

Greek liturgical chant and Western plainsong probably did not sound especially different throughout the medieval period.33 loc: 8956   

The real separation came with the trauma of the complete Ottoman conquest in 1453, when a great divergence in musical practice began. In particular, the Orthodox were never seized by the enthusiasm for the pipe organ which, in the era of Constantinople’s fall, began its long dominance of the musical imagination of Western Christians. loc: 8957   

the two worlds spoke much more frequently to each other, albeit not always harmoniously. loc: 8960   

One of the catalysts for exchange was the ultimately futile sequence of negotiations for reunion of the Churches which preoccupied thirteenth-century popes: loc: 8962   

translation work of Planudes was not confined to theology; he ranged through Latin classics loc: 8970   

followed by a number of scholars who widened the range of texts on offer, loc: 8972   

It was an acknowledgement unprecedented since the days of Justinian that other cultures could have major contributions to make to Byzantine society, but in many sections of the Church that was a deeply controversial and unacceptable idea.36 loc: 8974   

Church was convulsed by a dispute about the validity of a style of mystical prayer known as Hesychasm. loc: 8977   

The principal combatants were Gregory Palamas, a monk of a community on Mount Athos who championed Hesychast spirituality, and Barlaam, an Orthodox monk from Calabria, loc: 8978   

h̄sychaz̄, ‘to keep stillness’ (or silence). Linked with the idea of stillness was the characteristic mystical idea of light as the vehicle of knowing God, or as a metaphor for the knowledge of God. Gregory Palamas maintained that in such practice of prayer, it is possible to reach a vision of divine light which reveals God’s uncreated energy, which is the Holy Spirit. loc: 8981   

pointed to the episode of transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus was with his disciples on Mount Tabor, and they could see that his face ‘shone like the sun’.37 The Transfiguration, already commemorated with greater elaboration in Orthodoxy than in the Latin West, therefore became a favourite Hesychast choice of subject for icons loc: 8984   

Apart from contemplation of the icon, there are practical ways to structure still or silent prayer: appropriate physical posture and correct breathing are important, and one characteristic practice is to repeat a single devotional phrase, loc: 8990   

There was a real risk that Hesychasts would forget all the dangers to which Maximus had pointed long before, allowing mystical experience to run out of control, and even wholly rejecting the control of reason in their search for God. loc: 9001   

echoing Symeon the New Theologian’s dismissal of philosophy, he went so far as to praise a lack of instructed knowledge as something good in the spiritual life loc: 9009   

Church council repeated previous vindications of Hesychasm in 1351, loc: 9029   

The condemnations of Barlaam became the last to be added to the anathemas or condemnations which are solemnly proclaimed in the Orthodox liturgy at the beginning of Lent. He ended his days in exile at the papal Court in Avignon, a convert to Western Latin Catholicism, and in his last years he performed a singular service to Western culture by teaching Greek to the great Italian poet Petrarch.44 loc: 9030   

It is not difficult to see why Palamas and the Hesychast movement should have triumphed in this dispute. He offered definable procedures for approaching the divine. It would be easy to take comfort from such apparently straightforward ways of coming close to God in an age when the political institutions of the Byzantine world presented a picture of decay and corruption, when all the known world faced the baffling terror of the Black Death (see pp. 552-4) and when Islam pressed ever closer. loc: 9038   

Barlaam by contrast presented no more than many honest and clear-minded theologians have offered across centuries when confronted by populist movements in Christianity: an openness to alternative Christian points of view, qualification, critique and nuance. He could be caricatured as pro-Western, loc: 9046   

HOPES DESTROYED: CHURCH UNION, OTTOMAN CONQUEST (1400-1700) loc: 9052   

Now ‘the City’ was shrunken and full of ruins, fields stretching between what had become villages sheltering within its ancient defences - though over all still loomed the Great Church and the ancient monuments loc: 9053   

The last emperors of Constantinople survived as long as they did because of the strength of their city walls, and because between repeated Ottoman sieges, from the end of the fourteenth century, they had agreed to become vassals of the Ottoman sultan. loc: 9055   

In 1396 there gathered what was possibly the largest crusader army ever, made up of knights from France, Germany and even remote England and Scotland, all led by the King of Hungary. It was soundly defeated loc: 9063   

In 1437 two rival Latin fleets set out for Constantinople to pick up Byzantine delegates for a council rendezvous, and in this peculiar ecclesiastical naval race, the papal fleet sailed into port a month in advance of the Basel party. loc: 9072   

Pope’s council, reconvened first in Ferrara and then in Florence. They were very serious in their intentions: the party from Constantinople numbered seven hundred, and included both the Patriarch Joseph and the Emperor John VIII Palaeologos. In fact such a widespread representation of contemporary Christianity had not been seen since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, loc: 9075   

the Latins were not prepared to make any substantial concessions even on the limited range of issues debated - the Filioque clause (this simple Latin word or three Greek words occupied discussions for six months), Purgatory, the use of unleavened bread, the wording of the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist and the powers of the papacy. loc: 9082   

emperor, worn down by the incessant wrangling and isolated by the death of the much-respected patriarch during the council proceedings, agreed to a formula of union in 1439. loc: 9084   

For many Byzantines, there seemed little point in accepting what looked like a fresh humiliation loc: 9086   

After that, there was little hope left for the survival of ‘the City’. loc: 9088   

Emperor Constantine had at best eight thousand soldiers to defend it against Sultan Mehmet II’s besieging army of more than sixty thousand, loc: 9093   

Giustiniani, badly wounded in fighting outside the city wall, insisted that one gate should be unlocked to let him back into the city and down to his ship. loc: 9097   

It was the Serbian city of Belgrade, far to the west of Constantinople, which benefited from the wave of emotion generated by preachers and musical publicists like Dufay, for it was temporarily saved from Ottoman capture by desperate Western armies in a new expedition in 1456.51 loc: 9121   

One of the first things which the new patriarch did was to burn one of the most important writings of fifteenth-century Byzantium’s most distinguished philosopher, loc: 9136   

important signal about the future direction of Greek Orthodoxy. This was a time when the Renaissance of the West was reaching the height of its rediscovery of and enthusiasm for Classical literature and, through Plethon, Plato in particular loc: 9139   

A remorselessly increasing total of the main churches became mosques. Hagia Sophia was naturally among them, loc: 9153   

As the traveller approached communities from villages to cities, minarets now dominated the horizon of roofs, just as the sound of worship was now the muezzin’s call rather than the Christian clanging summons to prayer.55 loc: 9164   

Christian population were given privileged but inferior and restricted dhimmi status (see p. 262) as a millet (distinct community) with the Oecumenical Patriarch at their head, loc: 9166   

alongside another rapidly growing group under a dhimma, Jews from Western Europe. Jews arrived here in their thousands from the 1490s after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal loc: 9168   

Ottoman Empire retained an extraordinary variety of cultures and jurisdictions, with no attempt being made to impose sharia or the customary law codes of Islam as an overall system loc: 9173   

Sultan recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch as head of all Orthodox Christians in the empire, loc: 9175   

the patriarch’s supposed authority was constantly undermined by the fact that he was at the mercy of the sultan. loc: 9180   

By their unstinting cooperation with the conquerors, the patriarchs saved their community from the worst possibilities of oppression. loc: 9183   

The result was a slow decline in the proportion of Orthodox Christians in the empire, perceptible from the late sixteenth century. loc: 9203   

The instinct after 1453 was to preserve what it was possible to preserve in the face of repression and relegation of Christians to second-class status. loc: 9210   

the end of the period of radical innovation in Orthodoxy, loc: 9211   

there were major barriers to understanding or reconciliation: the long memory of 1204 overshadowed contacts with Roman Catholics which did not result in full submission to the pope’s authority, and Protestant detestation of images - even the nuanced position of the Lutherans (see pp. 619-20) - was deeply offensive to the iconophile Orthodox.62 loc: 9217   

His enemies fomented a poisonously anti-Protestant mood in the Orthodox Church, and the Jesuits sealed their triumph over Lucaris as Greek Orthodoxy moved closer to Roman Catholicism during the seventeenth century, encouraged by steady investment by the Catholic monarchy of France, both commercial intervention and discreet royal diplomatic support of Eastern Christians within the Ottoman domains loc: 9260   

Military achievements against the Ottomans were largely defensive, loc: 9264   

It was only at the end of the seventeenth century, after the great symbolic reversal of Ottoman fortunes when the Sultan’s armies were beaten back from Vienna by Polish and Habsburg forces in 1683, that the situation began to change. loc: 9265   

Topic: Chapter 15 Russia: The Third Rome (900-1800)

15 Russia: The Third Rome (900-1800) loc: 9268   

A NEW THREAT TO CHRISTENDOM: NORSEMEN, RUS’ AND KIEV (900-1240) loc: 9270   

Repeatedly in his text he found the concept of universal Christianity, and wondered how to translate it; he came up with a new Anglo-Saxon word, ‘Cristendom’.1 Our scribe was inventing a term which his readership could use to express their part in the universality of a continent-wide culture focused on Jesus Christ. loc: 9274   

the scribe’s optimistic tone defied the fact that Wessex was facing new barbarians, apparently intent on destroying everything that Christendom meant for England. The perpetrators sailed across the North Sea from Scandinavia, loc: 9279   

people of Constantinople also encountered Norsemen or Vikings, but knew them by a different Scandinavian word: Rus’ or Rhos.2 There too the word began as a name of terror; the Rus’ were part of a single Scandinavian movement of restlessness, plunder and settlement which both sent the Norsemen to England and impelled these peoples into the plains of eastern Europe. They seem to have sailed there mainly from Sweden; among loc: 9284   

In 860 the Rus’ streamed southwards and laid siege to Constantinople itself. loc: 9289   

Photios’s reaction was characteristically far-sighted: he proposed a religious solution for a political problem. He laid plans for a Christian mission to the Rus’, loc: 9291   

in the mid-tenth century Norse leaders seized a settlement on the borders of the Khazar territories. It was at a confluence of rivers, and its easily defended hills were useful storage places for weapons and goods in transit: its name was Kiev or Ky’iv.6 loc: 9302   

clan group known in later histories as Rurikids loc: 9304   

established a brisk trade with the Byzantine Empire, loc: 9305   

957 a Rurikid princess, Olga, paid a ceremonial visit to Constantinople from Kiev. She was currently regent for her son Sviatoslav and the purpose of her visit was to complete her conversion to Christianity by receiving baptism. loc: 9314   

Sviatoslav’s son and successor, Vladimir, now had no choice but to come to terms with Constantinople’s military success, loc: 9324   

Basil faced rivals for the throne, including his co-emperor, who was his younger brother. To secure his position, he turned to the Prince of Kiev for substantial troop reinforcements, loc: 9327   

promise of marriage to his sister, the imperial Princess Anna loc: 9328   

Basil’s throne was secured, thanks to his bodyguards from Rus’.10 The Byzantines continued to recruit elite warriors from the north, not merely from Rus’ but directly from far-off Scandinavia; from the end of the tenth century, they referred to them as ‘Varangians’. loc: 9330   

Prince Vladimir was not going to let the remarkable and unprecedented gift of a Byzantine princess slip from him, and in 988, to reinforce his new alliance with the Emperor, he abruptly ordered the conversion of his people to Christianity, loc: 9336   

his envoys to Constantinople swayed the decision by reporting their awe and astonishment on entering the Great Church of Hagia Sophia: loc: 9340   

Kiev soon boasted a stone-built palace complex and the beginnings of a proliferation of stone churches amid its fleet of wooden buildings, remaking the city in a Christian mould. loc: 9348   

tendency to select particular themes from Byzantium and then develop them remorselessly was characteristic of what became Russian Orthodoxy. loc: 9358   

those who met a violent and premature end for no good reason deserved to be regarded as saints. loc: 9379   

reflected a strand in Russian spirituality which remained strong in later centuries: its ‘kenotic’ emphasis on the example which Christ gave of his emptying of the self, his humiliation and compassion for others. If Christ was passive, both in the modern usage of the word and (in a closer sense to the original Latin verb patior, ‘to suffer’) accepting of his suffering, so followers of Christ should imitate his self-emptying. loc: 9382   

new popularity which from very early on an old genre of Eastern saint enjoyed in the Christianity of Kievan Rus’, and which has endured into modern Russian Orthodoxy: the Holy Fool. loc: 9391   

growing local devotion to innocence and unreason. loc: 9394   

Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer became important elements in Russian spiritual practice. loc: 9397   

Individual introspection and wild individual extroversion pointed to a common core in kenotic spirituality, and they both complemented the ordered corporate solemnity of the Orthodox liturgy.18 loc: 9398   

It took some time to persuade Kievan Christians that the Latins were heretics, a view which only became plausible to them during the thirteenth century, once Latin bishops in eastern Europe made it quite clear that they regarded the Church of Kiev as heretical and started poaching on territories within its jurisdiction. loc: 9408   

TATARS, LITHUANIA AND MUSCOVY (1240-1448) loc: 9412   

initial Mongol impact on Rus’ was as catastrophic as in Asia. In 1240 they sacked Kiev loc: 9413   

obliterating a whole set of relationships between Kievan Rus’ and communities and networks of trade on the trans-Danubian Hungarian plain. loc: 9415   

Tatar power dominating eastern Europe and exacting tribute loc: 9419   

the Kipchak Khans kept their animist beliefs, but their people included many Turks, and they followed the general drift of Mongol leaders into Islam. loc: 9422   

tolerant of Christianity, and allowed a bishopric to be established in their capital cities loc: 9424   

no effort to curb the Christian use of icons.22 loc: 9426   

Constantinople soon did its best to cultivate the new power, desperate for allies against the encroaching Ottomans, loc: 9428   

Mongol onslaught had wiped out whole communities, loc: 9434   

Many presumed that God must be punishing them for their sins, and they turned to prayer, both for themselves and for those who died. They naturally looked to monks as the experts in prayer, loc: 9436   

one great historic Christian city far to the north did survive the general wreck, and remained independent - Novgorod. loc: 9439   

continued to prosper mightily on trade, particularly its control of fur-trapping, and it built up its own northern empire with a reach from the Baltic to the Ural Mountains. In the twelfth century it had ejected its Kievan princes: the constitution which it then created was a republic of merchant families loc: 9442   

Because of this broad distribution of responsibility, the citizens of Novgorod valued literacy far more than anywhere else in the region, and loc: 9445   

close contact with the German merchant confederation of towns and cities known as the Hanseatic League, whose constitutions were developing in the same fashion, loc: 9448   

Novgorod and Pskov became notably open to dissident religious movements which criticized the worldliness of the Church’s leadership, a phenomenon not otherwise much known in Rus’ in that era, loc: 9456   

Hitherto little noticed in the affairs of Rus’, in the later thirteenth century the ambitious rulers of Moscow began to make the most of their remoteness from Tatar interest or interference. loc: 9462   

modelled many of their political institutions on those of Mongol society, loc: 9467   

By the fourteenth century, as their territories and influence expanded, the Tatars allowed them to take the title of Grand Prince, loc: 9468   

increasing tension with a growing power to the west, the grand princes of Lithuania.28 loc: 9470   

The grand princes of Lithuania were the last major rulers in Europe to resist making a choice between the three great monotheisms, proudly keeping to their ancestral animist faith. They were vigorous and effective warlords loc: 9473   

Soon it was natural for the Orthodox of the region to start looking to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, rather than the sad remnants of past magnificence at Kiev, which the metropolitan bishop now hardly ever visited; loc: 9483   

Throughout the fourteenth century, a contest took place between Muscovy and Lithuania as to who would host this key figure in the Christianity of Rus’ - in effect, who really would be the ‘Natural Successor of the Rus”. loc: 9486   

The Oecumenical Patriarch and emperor in Constantinople enjoyed the position of referees. loc: 9488   

Metropolitan Peter of Kiev and all Rus’ died in 1326 soon after taking up residence in Moscow. A cult of the ‘miracle worker’ rapidly grew up around him and he was declared a saint. loc: 9493   

Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania did not help his case when, in the late 1340s, he executed three Lithuanian Christians in Vilnius for refusing to eat meat…became the focus of a cult, …Vilnius martyrs loc: 9505   

Amid the steady expansion of Lithuanian frontiers, the Latin Christian Teutonic Knights were a continuing source of annoyance and harassment to the Lithuanians, continually crusading against the godless grand prince, and in the process helping themselves to a number of attractive territories and towns along the Baltic loc: 9523   

Much more promising for the Lithuanian prince was an alliance with Poland. The Poles were fellow victims of the Knights, but they were also uncompromisingly Catholic. loc: 9531   

Polish nobility agreed on her marriage to Jogaila (then approaching forty), and in 1386 they elected him king of Poland, after he had been baptized a Catholic loc: 9535   

committed the dynasty to the Catholic fold, despite the fact that, in the Grand Principality of Lithuania, Catholics were in a distinct minority. loc: 9538   

claim of the Lithuanian grand princes to be natural successors to the princes of Rus’ now looked much less convincing loc: 9540   

no question that the metropolitan bishop should make his principal residence anywhere other than Moscow, loc: 9542   

Metropolitan Izydor, who had left Moscow to attend the Council of Florence loc: 9549   

loyally accepted the reunion deal hammered out at the council by Emperor John VIII Palaeologos loc: 9549   

Prince Vasilii II summarily declared him deposed and had him imprisoned; he proved to be the last Metropolitan of Kiev resident in Moscow appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.35 loc: 9550   

assertion of Vasilii II’s power in the Church in the late 1440s, his coins began bearing a new title, ‘Sovereign of all Rus” or ‘Sovereign of the whole Russian land’. loc: 9553   

Muscovy had broken with the ancient power of Constantinople in the name of preserving Orthodoxy.36 loc: 9559   

scholarship to pursue its own answers to the puzzles raised by the Christian proclamation. What it did have were complex sets of rules and conventions in worship imported from Byzantine Christianity, the longing of ordinary folk to find ways to reach God amid the frequent harshness of their lives, and the capacity of the human imagination to range freely in solitude over a spiritual inheritance. loc: 9562   

This version of Orthodoxy was now the basis for Christian belief among a people with no reason to take an interest in Classical culture. loc: 9566   

loneliness was part of everyday experience even more than is normal for human beings. loc: 9569   

The emphasis of Orthodoxy on corporate life, expressed in its liturgy and sacred music, appealed to medieval Russian society, for here people needed to cooperate to survive at all. Individualism was not a virtue loc: 9571   

Russian Orthodoxy was not a spirituality which valued new perspectives or original thoughts about the mysteries of faith: it looked for deepening of tradition, enrichment of the existing liturgy, enhanced insight through meditation. loc: 9574   

dominant personality in the spiritual life of the Church in Rus’ during the fourteenth century was not a metropolitan or a grand prince but the monk Sergei (Sergius) loc: 9588   

adopted the discipline used in the Stoudite monastery of Constantinople (see p. 451), which represented a much more rigorous and structured life than the rather loosely organized monastic foundations of Rus’ in the Kievan era. Trinity Lavra was the inspiration for a renewal of Russian monastic life in a ‘desert’ mould. loc: 9594   

hermits remained much more common in the Russian Church than in the West. loc: 9598   

wandering holy men represented a spirituality hardly in touch with the Church hierarchy. loc: 9599   

personal charisma which, like that of prophets in the first days of the Christian Church (see pp. 131-2), gave them their own authority, loc: 9600   

practical utility in a perpetual frontier society which over several centuries saw settlements steadily expand north and east into remote areas: a hermit built his hut in a lonely place and made the place holy, later to be joined by others who created a monastery under some variant of a Stoudite rule. loc: 9609   

Thus did the monastic life spread - and with it also the political control which was increasingly monopolized in eastern and northern Rus’ by the Grand Princes of Muscovy. loc: 9612   

Artists took their models from the Church art of Byzantium, loc: 9618   

Originality was not prized; genius was measured by the painterly eloquence and moral fervour with which the tradition could be presented. loc: 9619   

MUSCOVY TRIUMPHANT (1448-1547) loc: 9629   

Church and Court cooperated very closely in an increasingly autocratic system which presented the Grand Prince as the embodiment of God’s will for the people of Rus’. The Grand Prince was effective in disposing of competitors: in 1478 he annexed the city-state of Novgorod, which had the effect of eliminating the model of a merchant republic from Russian society. The Hanseatic League regarded this annexation as a watershed in its relations with the East: it permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners. loc: 9632   

Church hierarchy aided them by preaching the holiness of obedience to the prince with a thoroughness and zest which had little precedent in Byzantium, loc: 9638   

During the fifteenth century, narratives of great saints of the Church lent their subjects’ authority to the growing concentration of power in the hands of the grand princes.41 loc: 9646   

Grand Prince Ivan III formally announced an end to the tribute which he and his predecessors had paid to the khans for two centuries. loc: 9650   

There was an urgent purpose to this hasty donning of imperial clothes. Measures needed to be taken to prepare for the end of the world, loc: 9653   

this meant that the Last Days were due in the year equivalent to mid-1492-3 in the Common Era. loc: 9656   

But as is usually the way with the non-appearance of the End Times, the disappointed made the best of their disappointment. God’s mercy in sparing Muscovite society confirmed that he approved of the arrangements which Church and emperor were making for its future governance; it strengthened Muscovites in their sense of a divine imperial mission specifically entrusted to their polity.43 loc: 9659   

churchmen began referring to the Church in Rus’ by the term previously adopted by the proud merchants and clergy of Novgorod for their own city: the ‘Third Rome’. loc: 9677   

award the Russian Church a particular destiny ordained by God. loc: 9678   

The main issue was the enormous wealth of the greater monasteries: it is not surprising that a critique of such riches developed, since it is likely that by the sixteenth century monasteries led by the Trinity-Sergius Lavra owned around a quarter of Russia’s cultivated land.49 loc: 9698   

‘Possessors’ defended such monastic wealth, pointing out how monasteries could and did use it for the relief and support of the poor; ‘Non-Possessors’ pointed to the greater value of monastic poverty in forming the spirituality of monks, and the need for monks to develop purity of heart rather than achieve perfection in the liturgy. loc: 9700   

‘the Judaizing heresy’,…Those who adhered to it apparently denied the reality of the Trinity, opposed icons and were critical of the existing clergy: loc: 9727   

IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE NEW PATRIARCHATE (1547-98) loc: 9755   

dismal extremity of what Muscovite autocracy might mean: Ivan IV, known to anglophone history as ‘the Terrible’.56 loc: 9758   

not surprising that Ivan graduated from childhood sadism towards animals to the bestial treatment of anyone who might be regarded as getting in his way, and of many who were entirely innocent of any such possibility. The only countervailing influence during his unlovely upbringing was the Metropolitan Makarii, loc: 9765   

Grand Prince’s career of tyranny, murder and power-seeking was shot through with an intense and justified concern for the welfare of his soul. loc: 9769   

Makarii who prompted Ivan to be crowned in 1547 as Tsar, in a now permanent augmentation of the title of Grand Prince, loc: 9770   

One can only speculate how Ivan, after taking such an active role in Church affairs, would have reacted to Pope Pius IV’s invitation to him in 1561 to send representatives to the Pope’s parallel contemporary reforming Council at Trent; the Tsar never got to hear about it. The Catholic Poles, horrified at the prospect that their Muscovite enemies might receive any sort of hearing at Trent, blocked two successive papal envoys from travelling on to Moscow, loc: 9776   

Around 1560 Ivan’s reign took a dark turn amid growing political crisis. The death of his first wife, whom he seems to have loved genuinely and deeply, was soon followed by the death of his brother and of Metropolitan Makarii. There was plenty in Ivan’s previous career to anticipate the violence which he now unleashed, loc: 9793   

Novgorod, once the republican alternative to Moscow’s monarchical autocracy, especially suffered, with tens of thousands dying in a coldly calculated spree of pornographic violence. loc: 9797   

The Tsar’s agents in atrocity, the oprichniki, were like a topsy-turvy version of a religious order: as they went about their inhuman business, they were robed in black cloaks and rode black horses, loc: 9798   

at his death, in 1584, he still left a country cowed and ruined. loc: 9801   

In the last phase of his reign, the Tsar poured resources into new monastic foundations in what is likely to have been an effort to assuage his spiritual anguish (exacerbated by his murder of his own son in 1581), confirming in his generosity the victory of the ‘Possessors’ in the Church. loc: 9805   

Church of Muscovy gained a new title which mirrored the dynasty’s assumption of imperial status; it became the Patriarchate of Moscow. loc: 9812   

Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania had built on their fourteenth-century manoeuvres to become one of the most successful political enterprises in eastern Europe, loc: 9830   

Polish and Lithuanian nobilities - Catholic, Ruthenian Orthodox and Protestant - reached an agreement at Lublin with the last Jagiellon king, Sigismund II Augustus, to create a new set of political arrangements. loc: 9833   

carefully safeguarded the rights of its many noblemen against the monarchy. loc: 9837   

by the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573, the nobility extracted from a reluctant monarchy an enshrined right of religious toleration for nearly all the varieties of religions established in Poland-Lithuania, Lutheran and Reformed, even anti-Trinitarian Protestants loc: 9841   

vast mass of the population spread through the plains and forests remained little affected by these lively new movements. In the west of the Commonwealth that meant that they persisted in their Catholicism, while in the east, the Ukraine and Volhynia and much of Lithuania, they were mostly Ruthenian Orthodox. loc: 9844   

Polish-Lithuanian King Sigismund III had concluded a deal with the majority of Ruthenian bishops, loc: 9866   

agreement on union. The model was the set of agreements in the fifteenth century around the Council of Florence. These had set up Churches which retained Eastern liturgical practice and married clergy, but which were nevertheless in communion with the pope and accepted his jurisdiction and the Western use of Filioque loc: 9867   

in 1632 the Polish monarchy had given in to reality. A new king, Władyslaw IV, needed both to secure his own recognition from his elector-nobles and to consolidate the loyalty of his subjects in the face of a Muscovite invasion. To the fury of Rome but to the relief of moderates on both sides, he recognized the independent Orthodox hierarchy once more in ‘Articles of Pacification’. From now on there were two hierarchies of Ruthenian Orthodox bishops side by side, one still Greek Catholic and loyal to Rome, the other answering to a metropolitan in Kiev in communion with Constantinople.67 loc: 9882   

foundation of a new academy in Kiev, in the year before he became metropolitan. This was the equivalent of a Western university and was based on the institutions which the Jesuits had so successfully created throughout Catholic Europe as vehicles for their mission (see pp. 665-6). It had a brilliant future in giving Orthodox clergy the possibility of as good an education as anything in the West. loc: 9897   

FROM MUSCOVY TO RUSSIA (1598-1800) loc: 9908   

On the death of Ivan IV’s son, Tsar Feodor I, in 1598, there was no obvious heir to the throne and civil war reduced the country to its ‘Time of Troubles’. After a dozen years of fighting and opportunistic invasions by neighbouring states, the country had virtually ceased to exist: there were Swedish armies in the north and Polish armies penetrating as far east as Moscow. loc: 9911   

from 1610 a movement of anger coalesced around princes of the Romanov family, cousins of the previous dynasty, and the occupying forces were painfully beaten back. In 1613 the teenaged Mikhail Romanov was declared tsar, the first in the dynasty which ruled until 1917. loc: 9913   

Rather than repudiate his vows and take the crown himself, Filaret was made patriarch once released from Polish imprisonment in 1619. Since the Patriarch then became the real ruler of Muscovy through a decade and a half of his son’s reign, there could hardly have been a closer union of Church and throne. loc: 9916   

Deeply anti-Catholic after his Polish captivity, loc: 9918   

steadily promoted the imposition of an even tighter autocracy on Muscovite society. loc: 9919   

One of the conditions of the Union of Lublin was a transfer of most of what is today the Republic of the Ukraine from Lithuania into the kingdom of Poland, loc: 9922   

Cossack political discontents combined with their fury both at what they saw as the violation of their Orthodox faith in the Union of Brest and at the steadily more aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism of the Polish monarchy, especially under King Sigismund III loc: 9925   

A bitter personal grievance led to the devoutly Orthodox Cossack Bohdan Kmel’nyts’kyi rallying a revolt against Polish rule. loc: 9932   

Kmel’nyts’kyi came to ally directly with Muscovy in 1654: loc: 9934   

By a treaty with the Tsar at Andrusovo in 1667, the Ukraine experienced its first partition, and Kiev was finally in the hands of Muscovy - the rest of the Ukraine followed a century later. loc: 9936   

transfer of allegiance by the Metropolitan of Kiev to the Patriarch of Moscow. loc: 9938   

Church of the Third Rome now dominated all Orthodoxy in northern Europe.72 loc: 9941   

The intellectual resources of the Mohyla Academy and other schools in the Ukraine were now at the service of the Tsar, and the academy was virtually the only long-term institute of higher education then available in Russia. loc: 9944   

Nikon was promoting a vision of Moscow as leader of Orthodox Christians throughout the world, loc: 9951   

Nikon constructed his claims round that venerable Western forgery the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351): he proposed that the patriarch and not the tsar should be the chief power in the state, loc: 9955   

His defeat showed where the balance of power in Church and State was really going to lie between patriarch and tsar. loc: 9959   

Popular religion based itself on the sacred drama which was the liturgical round controlled by the Church’s kalendar, but Nikon was conscious that in many respects this drama had departed from the script set by the contemporary Church in Constantinople. Moreover, it was mixed up with a good deal of local ritual loc: 9962   

He therefore announced reforms which he claimed were based on deep research into the most venerable of liturgical texts; loc: 9965   

outrage many of the faithful, who were accustomed to thinking of the liturgy as an unchangeable ordinance of God. loc: 9968   

In the matter of liturgical reform, Tsar Aleksei was at one with the deposed patriarch despite their otherwise complete breach, and he persisted in enforcing the changes. loc: 9975   

The movement of outrage and protest was coalescing into a series of sects which all saw themselves as the pure version of an official Church which had betrayed the faith; they came to be known as the Old Believers, a movement which gained vastly from protests against further changes in the Church during the eighteenth century, and which loc: 9987   

Romanov autocracy was completed by Tsar Aleksei’s son Peter I ‘the Great’, who defeated the rival northern power of Sweden, and humiliated and subverted the now declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1721 Peter proclaimed himself Emperor of All the Russias, setting patterns for Russian expansion loc: 9989   

transformation of Muscovy into a newly conceived empire was accomplished not merely by military conquest but by Peter’s obsessive pursuit of Western skills and information, loc: 9993   

Peter placed principal value on two inheritances: first, the ideology of unquestioning obedience to the tsar as the foundation of Russian identity, and second, the institution of serfdom, which he intensified and extended, loc: 10005   

he determined that never again would a tsar face a similar challenge from an ecclesiastical rival; loc: 10009   

in 1721, Peter undertook a major reorganization of Church leadership which concentrated all its power in his hands. loc: 10011   

Instead of the patriarch’s rule, there would now be a twelve-strong ‘College for Spiritual Affairs’, presided over by an official appointed by the tsar, the chief procurator. It was reminiscent of the state-dominated Church government which had been in place in some Lutheran princely states of the Holy Roman Empire for the previous two centuries, loc: 10016   

it became entitled the Holy Synod. loc: 10021   

a source of grief and anger to many in the Russian Church, loc: 10024   

The Church was an organ of government, loc: 10027   

The clergy were in any case divided among themselves: there was resentment of the Ukrainian-trained clique around the Tsar, and there was also an increasingly bitter division among the clergy between the ‘black’ elite of monks, with a superior education and a career pointing towards the episcopate and higher Church administration, and the ‘white’ clergy, married and serving in the parishes. loc: 10032   

Peter introduced seminaries for clergy training, an institution familiar in Catholic and Protestant Churches to the west, but here they had a curriculum narrowly focusing on the theme of obedience and the selective version of Orthodox tradition loc: 10035   

If anything saved Orthodoxy through its eighteenth-century period of unsympathetic leadership and low clerical morale, it was its profound hold over the lives and emotions of ordinary people, which contrasted with popular attitudes to state power. loc: 10043   

dissidence of the Old Believers, whose numbers and variety swelled during the eighteenth century. They preserved older traditions of worship and devotional styles which the authorities had repudiated, and their rejection of novelty was a rejection of all that they saw as not Russian. loc: 10054   

Sometimes Russian dissidence spiralled off into the most alarmingly eccentric varieties of Christianity ever to emerge from meditation on the divine, usually fuelled by the belief which had once been the mainstay of the official Church, that the world was about to end and the Last Judgement was to come. loc: 10060   

entrenched traditions of popular Orthodoxy survived the Church’s institutional faults; so holy men and women continued to seek stillness in Hesychasm, and to bring what comfort they could to the troubled society around them. loc: 10072   

there was much more to the tsars’ intervention in the Ottoman Empire, as it became apparent that the hold of the Turkish sultan on his territories was beginning to weaken. During the eighteenth century, throughout the Orthodox world still ruled by Muslims in the Balkans and the East, Churches began looking with increasing hope to this great power in the north which proclaimed its protection over them, whose Church still announced itself to be the Third Rome, and which pushed its armies ever further into the lands loc: 10085   

Topic: Chapter 16 Perspectives on the True Church (1300-1517)

16 Perspectives on the True Church (1300-1517) loc: 10093   

THE CHURCH, DEATH AND PURGATORY (1300-1500) loc: 10094   

The Bishop of Rome was Pontifex Maximus, the priestly title once appropriated by the Emperor Augustus and his successors and then redeployed by the papacy, while the acknowledged senior among central Europe’s princes and cities was an emperor, now calling himself both ‘Holy’ and ‘Roman’. loc: 10108   

it was a siege by plague-stricken Mongols from the Kipchak Khanate of a Genoese trading post in the Crimea in 1346 which first brought Europeans into contact with the Black Death. Genoese fleeing the horror instead took the disease first to Constantinople, then around the whole circuit of the Mediterranean. loc: 10119   

In Central Asia, this same plague hastened the ruin of the Church of the East during the fourteenth century loc: 10125   

while plague still raged, there was an equally powerful impulse to seek someone to blame for God’s anger: either oneself, collective sin in society or some external scapegoat. loc: 10135   

renewed and much grimmer version of the flagellant movement loc: 10137   

outbreaks of flagellant activity became associated with quite exceptional anti-Semitic violence, loc: 10139   

1349 Pope Clement VI, lobbied by alarmed monarchs, bishops and city authorities, issued a bull, Inter Sollicitudines, which forbade flagellant processions, loc: 10143   

Church came to take over and regularize a good deal of flagellant activity, loc: 10145   

intensified the personalized devotion which had grown up in the thirteenth century, and singled out the themes of suffering, the Passion and death. In northern Europe, new shrine cults of relics of Christ’s blood sprang up. loc: 10151   

after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, loc: 10157   

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 loc: 10173   

Moreover, while the dead were languishing in the penitential misery of Purgatory preparatory to being released to eternal joy, they might as well get on with showing some gratitude for the prayers of the living by returning prayer back to them for future use. loc: 10179   

First is the principle which works very effectively in ordinary society, that a wrong requires restitution to the injured party. So God demands an action from a sinner to prove repentance for a sin. loc: 10184   

Second is the idea that Christ’s virtues or merits are infinite since he is part of the Godhead, and they are therefore more than adequate for the purpose of saving the finite world from Adam’s sin. Additional to Christ’s spare merits are those of the saints, headed by his own mother, Mary: clearly these are worthy in the sight of God, since the saints are known to be in Heaven. Accordingly, this combined ‘treasury of merit’ is available to assist a faithful Christian’s repentance. loc: 10186   

The treasury of merit can then be granted to the faithful to shorten the time spent doing penance in Purgatory. That grant is an indulgence. loc: 10190   

only natural for pious Christians to show gratitude for such an act of charity on the Church’s part. Eventually their thanks-offerings became effectively a payment for the indulgence, loc: 10194   

they were very useful for fund-raising for good causes, loc: 10197   

charitable homes for the elderly and infirm called hospitals (themselves a part of the Purgatory industry, since their grateful inmates were expected to pass their time praying for the welfare of the souls of their benefactors). loc: 10198   

the theologian Raimund Peraudi argued that indulgences were available to help souls of people already dead and presumed to be in Purgatory, loc: 10202   

In the north, will-makers put big investment into such components of the Purgatory industry as Masses for the dead. In Germany there was a phenomenal surge in endowment of Masses from around 1450, with no signs of slackening until the whole system imploded under the impact of Luther’s message…Spain and Italy do not reveal the same concern. loc: 10213   

Purgatory-centred faith of the north encouraged an attitude to salvation in which the sinner, lay or clerical, piled up reparations for sin; action was added to action in order to merit years off Purgatory. It was possible to do something about one’s salvation: loc: 10225   

Luther’s first attack…He was telling northern Europeans that some of the devotions which most deeply satisfied them, and convinced them that they were investing in an easier passage to salvation, were nothing but clerical confidence tricks. loc: 10229   

PAPAL MONARCHY CHALLENGED (1300-1500) loc: 10232   

‘Imperialists’, apologists for the Holy Roman Emperor in thirteenth-century conflicts with the papacy, loc: 10235   

imperial spokesmen who first regularly termed the pope ‘Antichrist’, loc: 10237   

Franciscan Spirituals elaborated talk of the Antichrist, particularly to condemn Pope Boniface VIII (Pope 1294-1303). In order to become pope, Boniface had summarily displaced and brutally imprisoned a disastrously unworldly hermit-partisan of their movement who had been unwisely elected pope as Celestine V.15 loc: 10238   

Pope’s aspirations were curtailed by his imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of King Philip the Fair of France. A French successor-pope then chose to live in the city of Avignon,…move brought the papacy closely under French influence,…Petrarch described it as a ‘Babylonian captivity’. loc: 10247   

Pope John XXII made further vocal enemies when after first crushing the Spiritual Franciscans, he further infuriated the ‘Conventual’ wing of the order which had made careful arrangements to avoid holding property while still establishing a regular life in convents. In 1321 John reversed earlier papal pronouncements supporting Franciscan poverty, loc: 10248   

new identifications of the Pope with Antichrist outdid all previous efforts in shrillness, and some Franciscans accused John of heresy for repudiating the pronouncements of his predecessors. loc: 10253   

William of Ockham, was among those leading the campaign. He had no hesitation in declaring Pope John a heretic to whom no obedience was due: loc: 10255   

Ockham survived John XXII’s condemnation for this opinion, and his nominalist approach to philosophy flourished, becoming one of the most influential modes of philosophical and theological argument in late medieval Europe. loc: 10258   

Marsilius’s [imperial spokesman] polemic on papal jurisdiction was that it was a careful dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, and through him with Aristotle, punctiliously backed up at every stage by biblical quotation. loc: 10262   

Since Thomas had so effectively shown that Aristotle could be reconciled with Christian doctrine, if it appeared that Aristotle’s teaching on political arrangements clashed with current Christian understandings, then the fault must lie with mistaken Christian teachers, not with the great philosopher. And the chief Christian teacher was of course the Holy Father in Rome, loc: 10263   

Protestant monarchs and their publicists much relished Marsiglio’s arguments two centuries later; in the 1530s Marsiglio was to be translated (and judiciously tweaked) to support Henry VIII’s break with Rome, loc: 10266   

Gregory XI a generation after John XXII tried to cure the wars in his Italian possessions by moving back to Rome in 1377, loc: 10269   

from 1378 there were two rival popes, both lawfully elected by the College of Cardinals.18 loc: 10270   

1414 one of them, John XXIII, took action in conjunction with the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to call a council safely outside Italy across the Alps at Konstanz. The council finally ended four decades of schism when, in 1417, it recognized the election of a new pope acknowledged by all factions, Martin V. loc: 10272   

the council produced a decree, ‘Sacrosancta’, proclaiming itself to hold its authority ‘immediately from Christ; everyone, of every rank and condition, including the Pope himself, is bound to obey it in matters concerning the faith, loc: 10275   

Konstanz added a further idea in its decree of 1417, ordering that a council should henceforth meet every ten years. If this took effect, a council was to become an essential and permanent component of continued reform and reconstruction in the Church. loc: 10279   

The eighteen-year session of a council at Basel from 1431 helped to discredit the conciliar option because despite much constructive work, including setting up its own legal processes to rival Rome’s, it culminated in a fresh schism. loc: 10281   

In 1460 a former conciliarist sympathizer, now Pope Pius II, formally forbade appeals from a decision of the papacy to a general council, in a bull entitled Execrabilis. loc: 10283   

Conciliarists never achieved consensus as to how to define the Church or account for the authority of a council. Was it a representation of all the people of God, in which case its authority rose up or ascended from the whole body of the faithful? Or was it an assembly of God’s ordained representatives, the clergy, in which case its power descended from God through the Church’s hierarchy? loc: 10288   

French theologian Jean Gerson,…Gerson saw a threefold development in the Church: a first primitive heroic era while it was still unacknowledged and often persecuted by the Roman Empire; a second period after the Emperor Constantine I had allied with it, when Church leaders had justifiably and responsibly accepted power and wealth; but then a third era of decay after the time of Gregory VII, when this process had been taken to excess, so that it must now be curbed. loc: 10299   

One of the aspects of Dionysius’s picture of a heavenly hierarchy which especially appealed to Gerson was an insistence on the highest standards possible for the clerical order, clergy’s imitation of the order of Heaven itself. loc: 10303   

Gerson was not seeking to destroy hierarchical Church structures, simply to recall them to purity, but he did not see a hierarchy as necessarily culminating in a papal monarchy. He was also a strong defender of parish clergy against the pretensions of monks and friars, pointing out that there had been no monastic vows in the Church in the time of Christ, Mary and the Apostles.21 loc: 10307   

the problem which conciliarism had originally raised - principally, how to deal with a pope who cannot lead the Church as God wishes - would not go away. loc: 10311   

rival council that in 1438 the Pope had called to Ferrara and Florence seemed to have achieved spectacular results in reunifying Christian Churches, both East and West, under papal leadership loc: 10317   

large deposits of alum were discovered at Tolfa, in the papal territories north-west of Rome.…new source of income loc: 10322   

suddenly in the 1490s Italy became the cockpit of war and the obsessive concern of the great dynastic powers of Europe. The trigger was the ambition of the Valois dynasty of France, when in 1494-5 Charles VIII intervened in the quarrels of Italian princes with a major military invasion; loc: 10326   

it was a natural protective strategy for the papacy stranded in the middle to redouble its self-assertion, a mood which in any case came naturally to the successive popes Alexander VI (1492-1503) and Julius II (1503-13), loc: 10330   

adjudication in 1493-4 between the claims of the two European powers which were now exploring and making conquests overseas, Portugal and Spain; he [Alexander VI] divided the map of the world beyond Europe between them, commissioning them to preach the Gospel to the non-Christians whom they encountered, loc: 10332   

restore the architectural splendour of their sadly ramshackle city; loc: 10334   

ruthlessly exploiting the Church’s most profitable offices to promote his relatives, loc: 10341   

Julius II relished being his own general when he plunged into the Italian wars loc: 10343   

for a century or more cardinals had been the military commanders most trusted alike by the pope and by their mercenary soldiers. loc: 10346   

NOMINALISTS, LOLLARDS AND HUSSITES (1300-1500) loc: 10351   

Lollards and the Hussites, rose to challenge the Church authorities. loc: 10353   

Another potential challenge was from the nominalism espoused by William of Ockham. loc: 10354   

Ockham denied the assumptions embodied in the Dominican Thomas Aquinas’s adaptation of Greek philosophy to Christianity, centring on the word nomen. At its simplest this is the ordinary Latin word for ‘name’, but in the philosophical terminology of the time it signified the universal concept of a particular phenomenon: loc: 10354   

Ockham and his fourteenth-century nominalist successors denied that there was any such individual reality behind a nomen. For them, it was simply a word to organize our thinking about similar phenomena loc: 10358   

If this was accepted, it became impossible to construct overall systems of thought or explanation by the use of reason. This denied the value of Aquinas’s work, with its majestic system of relationships throughout the cosmos: it implied that the line of analytical thought derived from Aristotle was pointless. loc: 10359   

what happens when bread and wine are consecrated in the Eucharist? loc: 10363   

Ockham and nominalist philosophers or theologians denied the usefulness of this language of substance and accidents, so they had no way of constructing such an explanation. loc: 10365   

The doctrine, and indeed any other doctrine of ultimate divine truths, could only be treated as a matter of faith, relying on the authority of the Church. And what would happen if one felt that the authority of the Church was at fault, as many nominalist-trained clergy were to do in the sixteenth century? loc: 10366   

nominalism came to dominate the universities of northern Europe during the fifteenth century, loc: 10371   

God in his infinite mercy ascribes value to human worth, and makes an agreement with humanity to abide by the consequences and let it do its best towards its salvation.…he allows a human being ‘to do that which is in oneself’ (facere quod in se est). loc: 10382   

When nominalism removed the human relationship with God from the sphere of reason, it came close to the mysticism which flourished from the thirteenth century. loc: 10383   

This also spoke of the unknowability of God, and it broadened into a style of personal piety known as ‘presentday /modern devotion’, Devotio Moderna. In Gabriel Biel, indeed, the two streams of nominalism and the Devotio flowed together. The Devotio became the dominant outlet for pious expression in the fifteenth-century West: loc: 10385   

tended to introspection, aided by that crucial contemporary technological advance in the spread of texts, printing. Printed texts made far more easily available to an increasingly literate public the writings of the mystics, loc: 10388   

relies not at all on gesture, which is so important a part of communicating in liturgy or in preaching. loc: 10392   

a new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society which valued book-learning for both profit and pleasure; loc: 10393   

Even if such people were in the crowd at the parish Mass, they were likely be absorbed in their layfolk’s companion to the Mass, or a Book of Hours - books commonly known as primers. loc: 10395   

Devotio. It also had the capacity to offer laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, the chance of achieving the heights and depths of religious experience in their everyday lives and occupations, just as if they had set out on pilgrimage. loc: 10400   

Its promise was that serious-minded laity could aspire to the high personal standards which had previously been thought more easily attainable by the clergy: loc: 10410   

summed up in the title of Kempis’s famous devotional treatise The Imitation of Christ. loc: 10412   

sat uneasily with Augustinian assumptions about fallen humanity. loc: 10413   

John Wyclif, an Oxford philosopher, was the reverse of a nominalist: in the manner of philosophers like Aquinas, he championed the idea that there were indeed universal, indestructible realities, loc: 10417   

began turning his philosophical assumptions into an attack on the contemporary institutions of the Church: loc: 10421   

Wyclif contrasted the universal reality of the invisible true Church with the false Church which was only too visible in the everyday world. loc: 10424   

There were some people, probably most, who were eternally damned and who therefore never formed part of the true Church. No one could know who was damned or who was saved, and therefore the visible Church, that presided over by popes and bishops, could not possibly be the same as the true Church, since it claimed a universal authority in the world. loc: 10426   

since all authority to rule or the right to own property (dominium) was in the hands of God, only those in a state of grace could enjoy them. loc: 10428   

Wyclif argued that it was more likely that rulers chosen by God like kings or princes were in this happy condition than was the pope, and therefore dominium should be seen as being entrusted to them. loc: 10429   

In place of the Church’s authority, Wyclif urged people to turn to the Bible, reading and understanding it, for it was the only source of divine truth. loc: 10435   

the Mass, on which so much of the Church’s power was based, was a distortion of the Eucharist which Christ had instituted. loc: 10436   

Wyclif deeply loathed…the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation loc: 10437   

He regarded the doctrine as a clerical deception developed during the Church’s eleventh-century usurpation of worldly power loc: 10438   

Church authorities sent a commission to his Leicestershire grave to dig up his bones and burn them for heresy. loc: 10442   

[Wyclif's followers were] given the contemptuous nickname of ‘Lollards’: that is, mumblers who talked nonsense.29 loc: 10444   

Wyclif’s Oxford admirers had followed his teaching on the unchallengeable authority of the Bible by producing the first complete translation of the Vulgate into English, so that all might have a chance to read it and understand it for themselves. loc: 10449   

In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English were officially banned by the English Church hierarchy, loc: 10450   

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. loc: 10454   

when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales. loc: 10456   

English Church authorities were so traumatized by the Wyclif episode that they were liable to regard any criticism as heretical. loc: 10465   

English Lollardy survived through personal networks,…their meetings seem to have been dominated by readings from their literature and by sermons. This suggests that their dissent was as much intended to complement public religion as to challenge it, loc: 10477   

marriage in 1382 of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV’s daughter Anne of Bohemia to the English King Richard II. loc: 10481   

Emperor Charles, also King of Bohemia, had made Prague his capital, lavishing money on it to create one of the most spectacular ensembles of public buildings in central Europe, loc: 10482   

Charles’s determination to make his capital a new Jerusalem for the Last Days of the world, was a natural breeding ground for urgent advocacy of Church reform loc: 10484   

the dean of the [Prague's] university’s Philosophical Faculty, the priest Jan Hus, became fired by Wyclif’s reforming message. loc: 10485   

Czech nobility had come to resent what they saw as the Church authorities’ interference in their affairs. Hus’s movement became an assertion of Czech identity against German-speakers in the Bohemian Church loc: 10487   

Hus and his followers made a particularly provocative gesture: in 1414 they began offering consecrated wine as well as bread to the laity in their Eucharists,…came to insist on frequent communion for the laity, loc: 10495   

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. loc: 10497   

a powerful symbol that the institutional Church was no longer capable of dealing constructively with a movement of reform. loc: 10499   

Hus’s death turned him into a Czech martyr: loc: 10500   

Once more the Eucharist became a symbol of the revolution: a mob was led by the insurrectionary preacher Jan Želivský bearing the eucharistic monstrance from his parish church to the city hall, where the crowd hurled thirteen Catholic loyalists from an upper window to their deaths, the first ‘Defenestration’ of Prague.34 loc: 10502   

violent destruction of symbols of traditional religion: the first large-scale wrecking of monasteries and church art by Christians in the history of Christian Europe, loc: 10505   

The period between the first and the second (rather less bloodthirsty) Prague Defenestration a year short of two centuries later (see p. 646) was one of continuous if intermittent religious warfare focused on Bohemia, all springing out of the martyrdom of Hus, loc: 10507   

an independent Hussite Church structure still survived, loc: 10513   

two points of difference from the pope’s Church: its use in worship of Czech, the language of the people, rather than Latin, and its continuing insistence on reception in both kinds or species loc: 10515   

In default of a native episcopate, effective power in the Church was firmly in the hands of noblemen and the leaders of the major towns and cities. loc: 10519   

remnants of the more radical Hussites, the Union of Bohemian Brethren…condemned all types of violence, including political repression, capital punishment, service in war or the swearing of oaths…rejected the idea of a separate priesthood, as well as the belief (still so dear to the Utraquists) that the Eucharist was a miracle in which bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus. loc: 10526   

group took refuge in the province of Moravia, and they came to be known as the Moravian Brethren. loc: 10528   

Bohemia became the first part of Latin Europe to slip out of its medieval papal obedience. loc: 10532   

By 1500, the failings of successive popes in their pretensions to be leaders of the universal Church compromised their defeat of the conciliarists in the fifteenth century, and did nothing to end continuing criticism of papal primacy. That made the papal machine all the more sensitive to any new challenge to its authority, loc: 10537   

OLD WORLDS BRING NEW: HUMANISM (1300-1500) loc: 10541   

late fifteenth century, when it became common to talk about the liberal/non-theological arts subjects in a university curriculum as ‘humanae litterae’ (literature human rather than divine in focus), loc: 10545   

scholar with a particular enthusiasm for these subjects was called a ‘humanista’.36 loc: 10546   

Petrarch so admired the poetic achievements of his older contemporary Dante Alighieri that he proclaimed that they represented a ‘rebirth’ (‘renascita’) of poetry as good as anything which had been written in ancient Rome. loc: 10554   

Italian peninsula had the advantage of ‘the encyclopaedia of antiquity buried beneath it’: the physical legacy of art and architecture from the heart of the Roman Empire loc: 10558   

Citizens of the great cities and the principalities of Italy, impelled by circumstances to consider the nature of government, looked for diverse precedents in the most impressive and successful commonwealths in the history books, the cities of Classical Greece and republican or imperial Rome.39 loc: 10563   

the technology of printing on paper opened up rapid possibilities of distributing copies of the texts, and gave much greater incentives for the spread of literacy loc: 10567   

Ottoman conquests which so terrorized Europe tipped the balance in the supply of manuscripts, bringing Greek culture west. loc: 10571   

Greek manuscripts came in the baggage of scholars fleeing from the wreckage of Christian commonwealths in the east, or were snapped up by Western entrepreneurs profiting from the catastrophe. loc: 10576   

While the Greek Church establishment posthumously repudiated Gemistos after the fall of Constantinople (see pp. 495-6), the Medici rulers of Florence celebrated his scholarship, and commissioned the equally gifted Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato into Latin. loc: 10580   

Now Plato’s attitude to the ultimate problems of philosophy, his sense that the greatest reality lay beyond visible and quantifiable reality, disposed humanists to disrespect the whole style of scholastic learning, loc: 10583   

In 1440 a group of humanist friends, headed by the architect and writer on art theory Leon Battista Alberti and encouraged by the local lord Cardinal Prospero Colonna, attempted the first major conscious venture in a scholarly exploration which had virtually no precedent in the ancient world, certainly none among its respected intellectual disciplines: archaeology. loc: 10590   

These pioneer archaeologists had learned almost for the first time how artefacts from the past might be witnesses to its strangeness, its difference, as well as how the present might gain from the discovery. They could apply the same thought to written texts.41 loc: 10596   

humanists gained new perspectives on Latin language and culture. They developed great enthusiasm for the first-century-BCE politician-turned-philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero loc: 10598   

humanist manuscript writers painstakingly mimicked the ‘Roman’ characteristics of what they took to be ancient script - in fact, it was the minuscule used by Carolingian copyists…southern European printers then imitated their script, producing a typeface similar to what you are reading here, loc: 10608   

visual forms of ancient buildings, sculpture, paintings and gardens were more and more accurately imitated as part of the effort to bring back to life the lost world of Greece and Rome loc: 10612   

Corpus Hermeticum, and others later translated into Latin and Arabic. Some dealt with forms of magic, medicine or astrology to sort out the problems of everyday life; some appealed to the same fascination with secret wisdom about the cosmos and the nature of knowledge which had created gnostic Christianity and later Manichaeism loc: 10619   

Humanists savoured the cheery prospect that with more investigation, hard work and possibly supernatural aid, more ancient wisdom might be more fully recovered. loc: 10624   

humanists were gratified to find reinforcement for their own sense of infinite possibilities in humankind; loc: 10628   

Cabbala embraced a vision of humanity as potentially divine and indwelt by divine spirit. loc: 10628   

cabbalistic and hermetic ideas together might complete God’s purpose in the Christian message by broadening and enriching it. loc: 10630   

How might one establish authenticity amid this intoxicating but unsorted flow of information? loc: 10633   

So much depended on texts being accurate. This meant developing ways of telling a good text from a corrupt text: loc: 10634   

Historical authenticity gained a new importance: it now became the chief criterion for authority. loc: 10636   

A ‘source’ (fons) for authority now outweighed the unchallenged reputation of an auctorita s, a voice of authority from the past. loc: 10638   

Ad fontes, back to the sources, was the battle-cry of the humanists, and Protestants took it over from them. An individual, equipped with the right intellectual skills, could outface even the greatest and most long-lasting authority in medieval Europe, the Church. loc: 10639   

notorious example of a revered text demolished was the Donation of Constantine, loc: 10641   

the phraseology and vocabulary of the Donation were radically wrong for a fourth-century document, instantly demolishing a prop of papal authority. loc: 10651   

new respect for sections of traditional scholarship of secondary importance in medieval universities: the non-theological parts of their arts curriculum, especially poetry, oratory and rhetoric. loc: 10653   

Humanists were lovers and connoisseurs of words. They saw them as containing power which, if used actively, could change human society for the better, and they were particularly concerned therefore to find the ‘true’ or original meaning of words. loc: 10654   

ancient Greece and Rome. Part of the project of transforming the world must be to get as clear as possible a picture of these ancient societies, and that meant getting the best possible version of the texts which were the main records of how those societies had thought and operated. loc: 10657   

a humanist was someone whose cultural roots were in Western Latin culture, and who knew little of the Christianities of either the Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian East. loc: 10661   

Eventually the central document of the Christian Church, its ultimate fons, the Bible, must come under humanist scrutiny. loc: 10662   

Medieval Western Christianity knew the Bible almost exclusively through the Vulgate, loc: 10666   

Humanist excavation now went behind the Vulgate text to the Tanakh and its principal Greek translation, the Septuagint. loc: 10667   

In translating the Greek, Jerome had chosen certain Latin words which formed rather shaky foundations for very considerable theological constructions by the later Western Church, loc: 10675   

The mere fact that for a thousand years the Latin Church had based its authority on a translation was significant, loc: 10678   

scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street-Greek poured out by Jesus’s post-Resurrection convert Paul of Tarsus, as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God. loc: 10679   

The shock of the familiar experienced in an unfamiliar form was bound to suggest to the most sensitive minds in Latin Christianity that the Western Church was not so authoritative an interpreter of scripture as it claimed. loc: 10680   

Previously, congregations in the West as in the East would have experienced the Bible primarily as performance:…This public performance of the Bible had depended in turn on a clergy who knew the Bible as an intricately layered set of allegorical meanings, loc: 10689   

Now the humanist perception of the Bible as a text written and then to be read like any other book began to place a question against a great deal of this venerable tradition. loc: 10694   

self-assertion from a new type of intellectual discipline previously subordinate to theology in the universities, loc: 10701   

Many humanists chose not to enter the traditional university system. loc: 10705   

Many humanists also saw the value of entering the service of powerful and wealthy people who would pay for their skills as wordsmiths, employing them to produce official documents in sophisticated Ciceronian Latin loc: 10707   

portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas, closely involved with ordinary life and government, in contrast to isolated ivory-tower academics loc: 10709   

Many professional theologians whose primary loyalty was to scholasticism felt as dissatisfied as the humanists with the nominalist scholasticism which had dominated university theology faculties over the previous century and a half. loc: 10714   

major revival of interest in Aquinas’s thought, and in the Reformation turmoil, for all Thomas’s emphasis on the mystery of God, Thomism came to seem the perfect weapon for the pope against Protestantism’s radical pessimism about the human mind’s capacity to approach the divine. loc: 10727   

reverence for Augustine, whose thought had from 1490 been made more widely available to humanists and scholastics alike, through the first scholarly printed edition of all his known works, loc: 10730   

general move among theologians over the next century, whether traditionalist in their scholasticism, humanist or Protestant, to listen afresh to the Bishop of Hippo.48 loc: 10732   

‘The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.’49 (B.B.Warfield) loc: 10735   

REFORMING THE CHURCH IN THE LAST DAYS (1500) loc: 10739   

[After Isabel and her successor Philip of Burgunday died occurred the] second union of the crowns under her widower, Fernando; henceforth they were never again divided, and Aragon and Castile could be regarded for external purposes as a single Spanish monarchy. loc: 10756   

Constant medieval warfare against Islam (and the Judaism which it sheltered) gave Spanish Catholicism a militant edge and an intensity of devotional practice not found elsewhere in western Europe. loc: 10761   

In 1391, a particularly vicious wave of anti-Jewish preaching provoked the massacre of around a third of the Jews in Christian Spain, and forced the conversion of another third. loc: 10764   

Isabel’s hold on the Castilian throne had initially been shaky, and her early political calculations established strategies through what became a long reign: first a new assault on Judaism, and later, after Granada’s fall in 1492, a parallel assault on Islam.52 loc: 10771   

newly constituted version of an inquisition, …organized by the monarchy,…settled down to work against ‘Judaizers’ in the kingdom of Castile, burning alive around seven hundred between 1481 and 1488. loc: 10776   

1483 and appointed the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as Inquisitor-General loc: 10777   

When Granada fell, Isabel gave Jews in Castile the choice of expulsion or conversion to Christianity. loc: 10778   

Perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 Jews chose to become refugees abroad rather than abandon their faith, forming a European-wide dispersal which has been called Sephardic Judaism loc: 10781   

Her expulsions of Jews were imitated in Portugal, when in 1497 King Manoel (who was hoping to marry her daughter) ordered mass conversion of the Jewish population, many of whom had only just fled from Spain.54 loc: 10788   

Latin Christianity, in an especially self-conscious version of its traditional form, became the symbol of identity for Iberia’s kingdoms, loc: 10790   

in advance of the general Protestant Reformation in Europe, Spain tackled many of the structural abuses - clerical immorality, monastic self-indulgence loc: 10792   

This Reformation was promoted by the monarchy, which increasingly excluded any real possibility of interference in the Church from the pope. loc: 10794   

Spanish royal power was consistently exercised to create a ‘purified’ and strong Latin Christianity free from heresy or non-Christian deviation, and indeed to spread it throughout the Spanish Empire overseas. loc: 10797   

Francisco Ximénes de Cisneros,…become confessor to Queen Isabel in 1492, loc: 10803   

austere, focused piety and his determination to proclaim his vision of Christian faith to the peoples of the Spanish kingdoms, loc: 10804   

spent money lavishly as a major patron of the most advanced scholarship of his day: he founded the University of Alcalá out of his own resources, and funded the printing of a great number of books particularly aimed at introducing the writings of his favourite mystics loc: 10808   

At the same time, he was responsible for burning thousands of non-Christian books and manuscripts, and he became Inquisitor-General in 1507, loc: 10810   

The Inquisition not only sought out evidence of continued secret practice of Islam or Judaism, but reinforced an existing tendency in Spanish society to regard heresy and deviation as hereditary. loc: 10815   

increasingly necessary for loyal Spanish Catholics to prove their limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), loc: 10817   

in 1609 there was finally a general expulsion order against 300,000 Moriscos, more than a century after Granada had fallen, the largest population expulsion anywhere in early modern Europe. loc: 10829   

around 1500 Spain was in a ferment of expectation of a universal monarchy, and avid for any dramatic manifestation of God’s plan for the future. loc: 10834   

Spanish version of Catholicism thus presents a complex set of features. It fostered deep personal yearnings for closeness to God, linked to mystical spirituality in Judaism and Islam and later bearing rich fruit in the mystical experience of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross loc: 10839   

After official Spain decisively rejected the peninsula’s multicultural past, it is not unfair to see subsequent Spanish Christianity as a major exponent and practitioner of ethnic cleansing. loc: 10842   

The independent forces in Spanish Christianity produced a movement of mystical and spiritual enthusiasm in which friars, conversos and pious women (beatas) came to be styled by their admirers as alumbrados (‘enlightened ones’).…alumbrados were formally condemned in September 1525, loc: 10851   

Two years after Granada had fallen, French armies invaded the Italian peninsula, sparking warfare and miseries of half a century’s duration. loc: 10855   

terrifying and hitherto unknown disease also broke out.…syphilis.60 loc: 10861   

disasters gave public credibility to the message of a charismatic Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola. loc: 10861   

from the early 1490s Savonarola began to preach in the Church of San Marco about the Last Days, and his preaching was soon accompanied by visions and announcements of direct communications from God. loc: 10862   

the growing misery of the situation throughout Italy: perfect conditions in which Savonarola could thunder apocalyptically about the dangers of rampant sexuality, especially sodomy, and demand radical political and moral reform in the name of God. loc: 10865   

divine action would bring a total transformation in existing society: loc: 10867   

Accordingly the Medici, humiliated in battle by King Charles of France in 1494, were expelled and a rigorously regulated republic proclaimed, in which Savonarola’s reorganization of society could begin. The message of his oratory was that his audience could rule supreme, or, if they remained stubborn, they would lose everything: loc: 10868   

first republic in human history where those in charge narrowly defined the concept of ‘republic’ as necessarily involving rule by the whole people loc: 10876   

In 1498 the friar’s power collapsed: he was tortured and burned at the stake with his chief lieutenants. loc: 10882   

Throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the grim chaos into which his republic had descended. loc: 10883   

group known as the Piagnoni sprang up in Florence to preserve his memory; loc: 10889   

The Piagnoni nursed the same combination of political and theological republicanism which had shaped the Savonarolan years, but after they succeeded in overthrowing the Medici afresh in 1527-30, their rule became a sadistic tyranny which did much finally to kill off Florentine republicanism and ensure the future of the Medici in power.64 loc: 10893   

chronic neurosis and apocalyptic expectations which disturbed the Italian peninsula for decades…prophecies, accounts of monstrous births and wondrous signs became sure-fire money-spinners for the printing presses, loc: 10903   

‘Amadeist’ manuscript, which still has its devotees, especially in the wilder corners of the Internet, predicted the coming of an Angelic Pastor or Pope, righting the world’s ill and heralded by Spiritual Men. A crucial task was correctly to identify these important characters. loc: 10906   

For over three decades from the 1490s, much of Europe was in high excitement about the future, ranging in expression from decorous humanist editing of hermetic and cabbalistic texts to prophecies from wild-eyed women in Spanish or Italian villages and angry sermons of respected clergy. loc: 10913   

[Utopias] A literary fashion emerged for imagining ideal societies and how they might work. loc: 10916   

ERASMUS: NEW BEGINNINGS? loc: 10918   

people came to Erasmus as devotees. He constructed a salon of the imagination, embracing the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, loc: 10925   

he was indifferent to where he lived, as long as he had a good fire, a good dinner, a pile of amusing correspondence and a handsome research grant. loc: 10928   

one aspect of the great humanist’s careful construction of his own image: he perfectly exemplified the humanist theme of building new possibilities, for he invented himself out of his own imaginative resources. loc: 10930   

ultimate non-person in medieval Catholic Europe, the son of a priest. loc: 10932   

He hated monastic life and became additionally miserable when he fell in love with Servatius Rogerus, a fellow monk loc: 10935   

identified an escape route: his passion and talent for humanist scholarship.67 loc: 10936   

Bishop of Cambrai, conveniently far to the south of Steyn, needed a secretary to give his correspondence the fashionable humanist polish loc: 10937   

he held just long enough to make sure that Steyn was well behind him and that there would be no serious recriminations loc: 10939   

he virtually created a new category of career: the roving international man of letters who lived off the proceeds of his writings and money provided by admirers. loc: 10942   

He wrote the first best-seller in the history of printing…compiled a collection of proverbs with detailed commentary about their use in the classics and in scripture.…offered the browsing reader the perfect short cut to being a well-educated humanist; loc: 10945   

he moved from a preoccupation with secular literature to apply his humanist learning to Christian texts. loc: 10948   

produced new critical editions of a range of key early Christian texts, the centrepiece of which was his 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament, accompanied by an expanding range of commentaries on the biblical text.…tacitly designed to supersede the Vulgate and the commentary which Jerome had created around it. loc: 10955   

his work of retranslation and commentary amounted to a thoroughgoing onslaught on what Jerome had achieved a millennium before. To attack Jerome was to attack the structure of understanding the Bible which the Western Church took for granted. loc: 10957   

where John the Baptist is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness, ‘metanoeite’. Jerome had translated this as poenitentiam agite, ‘do penance’, and the medieval Church had pointed to the Baptist’s cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance. loc: 10959   

Erasmus said that John had told his listeners to come to their senses, or repent, loc: 10961   

Indeed, throughout the Bible, it was very difficult to find any direct reference to Purgatory, loc: 10962   

bad theology stemmed from faulty grammar, or faulty reading loc: 10964   

Commentators found justification for their allegorizing by quoting a biblical text, John 6.63: ‘The Spirit gives life, but the flesh is of no use’ - allegory was the spiritual meaning, the literal meaning the fleshly. loc: 10966   

Readers of the Bible were right to note allegory in its text, but they should do so with caution and common sense. loc: 10968   

it had been a natural impulse for commentators to try to expand the rather slim biblical database about her through the use of allegory. Erasmus came to deplore the redirection on to Mary of Old Testament texts. loc: 10969   

universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity - that she had remained a virgin all her life. Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in scripture, was based on allegorical use of Ezekiel 44.2, which talks about the shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter. loc: 10976   

he set out a precise position: ‘We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.’ loc: 10980   

In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient claim that there were matters of some importance which had to be taken on faith, because the Church said that they were true, rather than because they were found in the Bible. loc: 10981   

Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition which the Church guarded, independent of it?…scripture versus tradition loc: 10985   

he wrote movingly and sincerely in his Prologue about his wish to see the countryman chant the Bible at his plough, the weaver at his loom, the traveller on his journey - even women should read the text. loc: 11012   

Erasmus wanted to end the excesses of clerical privilege, particularly the clergy’s pretensions to special knowledge, and he was always ready to show contempt both for incompetent and unlearned clergy and for what he saw as the pompous obscurity of professional theologians. loc: 11014   

Erasmus was profoundly repelled by the everyday reality of layfolk grasping at the sacred, the physicality and tactility of late medieval popular piety. For him this was fleshly religion, ignoring the inner work of the Spirit which comes to the faithful through the mind and through pure use of the emotions: loc: 11018   

Outward ceremonies and ritual mattered much less than quiet, austere devotion springing from inner contemplation. loc: 11025   

his vision of a cerebral, disciplined, biblically based Christianity, echoing in humanist style with the timbre of classical philosophers: philophia Christi, the learned wisdom of Christ.71 loc: 11028   

one should never place too much faith in individual writings of Erasmus, who wrote a great deal for effect, for money and to curry favour. loc: 11032   

The Church as a visible institution was chiefly important to him as one of his main sources of cash, as he sought a spectrum of patrons to sustain the writing and research which were his real concern.72 loc: 11033   

With typical humanist optimism, he believed that he could improve the world with the help of the leaders of commonwealths (as long they read and paid for his books), and that he could make his own agenda of universal education and social improvement into theirs. loc: 11036   

‘What is the state [‘civitas’] but a great monastery?’73 loc: 11043   

denied that there was anything distinctive or useful about monasteries: loc: 11044   

be an active citizen of a ‘civitas’ as in ancient Greek city-states, and everyone had a duty to behave as purely as monks were supposed to do under a monastic rule. [and] the person to make sure that they did so was the prince. loc: 11048   

message much appealed to secular rulers, and fitted in with the existing late medieval trend towards princes and commonwealths taking power in matters of religion and morality out of the hands of churchmen. loc: 11048   

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became an age which historians have termed ‘the Reformation of Manners’, when governments began to regulate public morality and tried to organize every individual in society in an unprecedented fashion…one of the most long-lasting consequences of Erasmus’s writings loc: 11052   

Erasmus did not share in Western theologians’ general stampede to praise Augustine…Erasmus was protesting against the whole perspective on knowledge which sees the only real truth as what is revealed by divine grace, rather than what is available through the reasoning faculties of the human mind and through the acquisition of education.…distrust of mysticism, loc: 11062   

he preferred that other giant of the early Church’s theology, the great counterpoint to Augustine across the centuries, Origen. loc: 11065   

Origen’s distinctive view of humanity (in jargon terms, his ‘anthropology’), which the Alexandrian had built on a passing phrase in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonian Church: a human being was made up of three parts, flesh, spirit and soul.75 loc: 11067   

Of the three components of humanity, Origen had said, only the flesh had been thoroughly corrupted, and the highest part, the spirit, was still intact. loc: 11070   

Erasmus’s fierce belief in pacifism, consistently one of the emphatic and radical elements in his thinking, was opposed to the discussion of the legitimacy of war which Augustine had pioneered and which Aquinas had then developed into a theory of ‘just war’. loc: 11078   

Erasmus’s discreet fascination with Origen and equally discreet coldness towards Augustine was a pointer to a possible new direction for Western Christianity in the early sixteenth century. loc: 11082   

Erasmus had rightly (but at the time unsuccessfully) poured scorn on the so-called ‘Johannine comma’, the suspect text in I John 5.7-8 which is the only explicit mention in the Bible of the Trinity in something like its developed form.78 loc: 11087   

also noted that the term ‘God’ is rarely used for Christ in the biblical text, being normally reserved for the Father alone. loc: 11089   

he brought an ironic smile to the contemplation of the divine and the sacred, and he discerned an ironic smile on the face of the divinity. loc: 11092   

He had taken one principled stand against Luther, and thus had signalled that he would not abandon the old Church (see pp. 613-14), but he still desperately tried to avoid decisively taking sides in the storm which was now tearing apart the world of elegantly phrased letters, high-minded reform projects and charming Latin-speaking friends loc: 11100   

increasing numbers on either side of the new divide regarded him as a time-serving coward who lacked courage to take sides now that everyone was expected to do so. loc: 11102   

Topic: Chapter 17 A House Divided (1517-1660)

17 A House Divided (1517-1660) loc: 11105   

A DOOR IN WITTENBERG loc: 11106   

Without the Elector Friedrich’s support (puzzling in its consistency - he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, loc: 11128   

foundation of the university was less conventional. The first in Germany to be founded without the blessing of the Church authorities, it brashly boasted against its older rivals that it could provide students with an up-to-date immersion in humanist learning.2 loc: 11134   

Caught in a thunderstorm in 1505, the young man was so terrified that he vowed to St Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would enter monastic life if he survived. loc: 11142   

Yet as he worked out a theology of salvation which echoed Augustine’s exposition of Paul, humanist techniques of scholarship constantly prompted him to challenge scholasticism. Increasingly openly, he despised the scholastic tradition both Thomist and nominalist: he loathed the presence of Aristotle in scholastic theological discussion, and he came to despise the nominalist idea of a salvation contract between God and humanity which Gabriel Biel had pioneered loc: 11150   

In 1515 Luther moved to lecturing on Paul’s letter to the Romans, so central a text for Augustine’s message about salvation. loc: 11157   

His own manuscript notes survive from these two lecture courses and in them themes appear which later coalesced behind his proclamation of justification by faith: his presentation of the psalms as a meditation on the message and significance of Jesus Christ, his affirmation that all righteousness comes from God, his pointers to the revelation in the words of scripture, a revelation dwarfing any truths provided by human reason. loc: 11160   

When Luther turned to Romans, at the heart of his presentation of the message of salvation was the doctrine of predestination: ‘whoever hates sin is already outside sin and belongs to the elect’. How could we get to this state without help from outside ourselves? loc: 11163   

this moment of agony resolved as a turning point forcing on him the realization that faith was central to salvation.6 loc: 11168   

Predictably the trigger was a text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: ‘the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written “he who through faith is righteous shall live” loc: 11169   

God through his grace ‘imputes’ the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this ‘imputation’ would not be ‘made’ righteous at all. loc: 11173   

Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul’s closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel. loc: 11176   

After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous God’s fury against his sinfulness. loc: 11183   

Indulgences, the Western Church’s grants remitting penitential punishments, could be seen as a practical demonstration that God loved sinners, and that God’s love was channelled through the power of the Church. loc: 11197   

The squalid implications of this, an insult to the Apostle Paul’s view of grace and salvation, led Luther to announce (probably with a notice on the Castle Church door) that he proposed a university disputation on ninety-five theses, taking a decidedly negative view of indulgences. loc: 11205   

Luther’s protest was quickly turned into an act of rebellion because powerful churchmen gave a heavy-handed response. He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority. loc: 11208   

the incendiary idea of conciliarism (see pp. 560-63) constantly hovered around their diatribes. A veteran Dominican papal theologian, Silvestro Mazzolini of Prierio (sometimes known as ‘Prierias’), was commissioned to write against the ninety-five theses. He saw a familiar conciliarist enemy in Luther, and he discussed the infallibility of Church authority at such length that it made Luther much more inclined to wonder whether the Church might be fallible. loc: 11211   

Cajetan demanded unquestioning obedience to the Pope from Luther, while Luther would not withdraw what he had said about grace. loc: 11223   

publicly burned the bull of excommunication loc: 11228   

Luther was beginning to see himself as chosen by God precisely for a heroic role: to deliver the Church from a satanic error. loc: 11229   

if the Pope was telling him that he was wrong in proclaiming God’s cause, that must mean that the Pope was God’s enemy. loc: 11231   

proclaim that the pope was the enemy not just of the empire but of all Christendom. As imperialist spokesmen had long maintained (see p. 558), he was Antichrist, but furthermore, so was the whole apparatus of his Church. loc: 11236   

seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. loc: 11238   

God’s Eucharist had been turned to a Mass which falsely claimed to be a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice once offered on the Cross. loc: 11239   

he kept a passionate sense of the presence of the Lord’s body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation. loc: 11240   

how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? loc: 11242   

The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom God had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity. loc: 11245   

Now that that Church authorities had responded, it was for the civil commonwealth to pronounce, in the person of its most exalted representative, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V, elected in summer 1519 to the huge relief of the Habsburg family, was then not out of his teens, but he ruled the largest empire that the Christian West had ever known. loc: 11247   

gave Luther a formal hearing within the boundaries of the empire at the first available meeting of the Diet, loc: 11251   

Ordered to say yes or no to the question ‘Will you then recant?’ loc: 11253   

‘if then, I revoke these books, all I shall achieve is to add strength to tyranny, loc: 11256   

He spelled out to the Emperor that without a conviction from ‘scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone)’, he could recant nothing. loc: 11258   

Georg Rörer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.14 loc: 11259   

Luther was in peril, and the best solution was for him to vanish; the Elector Friedrich duly arranged that. Luther occupied those months in the Wartburg, a Wettin stronghold on the wooded massif high above Eisenach, familiar to him from his childhood, by beginning a translation of the Bible into German. loc: 11263   

his text has shaped the German language.…Luther’s talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases.…his genius seized on the fears of ordinary folk in a world full of evils and terrors, loc: 11275   

Erasmus chose his question carefully. The choice reflected his own distaste for the Augustinian theology which meant so much to Luther: has humanity retained free will to respond to God’s offer of grace? loc: 11287   

Erasmus was a humanist pleading for people to be reasonable - and also saying bluntly that unreasonable people should not be brought into technical discussions of theology. Moreover, he believed that human beings could indeed be reasonable, because when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden, their God-given capacity to reason had not been fully corrupted, only damaged. loc: 11292   

Luther by contrast was a prophet proclaiming an inescapable message to all fallen humanity. loc: 11295   

Luther set out a pitiless message that human beings could expect nothing but condemnation, and had nothing to offer God to merit salvation: loc: 11297   

If we believe that Christ redeemed men by his blood, we are forced to confess that all of man was lost; otherwise, we make Christ either wholly superfluous, or else the redeemer of the least valuable part of man only; which is blasphemy, and sacrilege.16 loc: 11298   

the very heart of the Reformation’s reassertion of Augustine, proclaiming that the humanist project of reasonable reform was redundant. loc: 11301   

THE FARMERS’ WAR AND ZWINGLI loc: 11307   

Many ordinary people, especially those defending their livelihoods against new exactions by their lords and by governments, saw Luther’s defiance of authority as a sign that all authority was collapsing in God’s final judgement on human sin. The Last Days had arrived, and everyone had a duty to hurry along God’s plan, which included overthrowing God’s enemies in high places. loc: 11309   

In 1525 large areas of central Europe were convulsed by revolts against princes and Church leaders: the Bauernkrieg , often misleadingly translated into English as the ‘Peasants’ War’, but better rendered the ‘Farmers’ War’ to get a sense of the sort of prosperous people - not so different from Luther’s family - who in their righteous anger and excitement led the crowds. loc: 11312   

revolts were brutally crushed - and Luther, terrified by the disorder, applauded the rulers’ brutality. loc: 11314   

‘Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from God’. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. loc: 11315   

For many of the cowed, resentful rebels, the Reformers’ message of liberation now seemed as big a sham and betrayal as the pope’s old offer of salvation. loc: 11317   

The leaders of the Church, the bishops, for the most part did not defect from the old organization, particularly those who were ‘prince-bishops’ of the Holy Roman Empire, temporal rulers as well as heads of their dioceses. loc: 11322   

The first prince to come over was a major coup from a rather surprising quarter: the current Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, loc: 11324   

To save himself from ruin, he begged another cousin, King Sigismund I of Poland, to remodel the order’s Polish territories in east Prussia into a secular fief of the Polish kingdom,…Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church,…during summer 1525, creating the first evangelical princely Church in Europe.19 loc: 11332   

Zürich became home to another variety of evangelical Reformation which had little more than an indirect debt to Luther, and whose chief reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, created a rebellion against Rome with very different priorities. loc: 11338   

he won a firm basis of support in the Zürich city council, which pioneered a Reformation steered by clerical minister and magistrate in close union. loc: 11345   

Now not Rome but Zürich city council would decide Church law, using as their reference point the true sacred law laid down in scripture. loc: 11349   

Zwingli’s clerical team, untrammelled by any major monastery, university theology faculty or local bishop, forged a distinctive pattern of evangelical belief…called Reformed, which crudely speaking meant all varieties of consciously non-Lutheran Protestantism. loc: 11354   

Reformed Protestantism from the beginning differed from Luther’s Reformation - much to his fury - in several key respects, principally its attitude to images, to law and to the Eucharist. loc: 11361   

Leo Jud, pastor of St Peter’s across the river from the Grossmünster, who in a sermon of 1523 pointed out quite rightly that the Bible ordered the destruction of images in no less prominent a setting than the Ten Commandments. loc: 11367   

Now Zürichers started pulling down images from churches and from the roadside. This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never enthused Swiss society. loc: 11373   

The city council took action: in October 1523 it arranged a further disputation, leading to the first official statement of doctrine produced anywhere in the Reformation. loc: 11374   

First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Mass itself was banned in the city. loc: 11375   

Luther decided that the problem of sacred art was no problem at all. Once the most obviously absurd images had been removed in orderly fashion, destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: loc: 11382   

ability to play fast and loose with scripture by omitting all reference to the Commandment prohibiting images. loc: 11385   

Zwingli did not share Luther’s negative conception of law, and because he so strongly identified Church and city in Zürich, he found the image of Zürich as Israel compelling. Israel needed law; law forbade idols. loc: 11391   

Despite being a talented and enthusiastic musician, Zwingli even banned music in church, because its ability to seduce the senses was likely to prove a form of idolatry and an obstacle to worshipping God. loc: 11393   

Zwingli, a thoroughgoing humanist in his education and a deep admirer of Erasmus, emphasized the spirit against the flesh. loc: 11399   

Luther, he thought, was being crudely literal-minded to flourish Christ’s statement at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body . . . this is my blood’, as meaning that bread and wine in some sense became the body and blood of Christ. loc: 11401   

Jesus Christ could hardly be on the communion table when Christians know that he is sitting at the right hand of God loc: 11404   

In any case, what was a sacrament? Zwingli, as a good humanist, considered the origins of the Latin word sacramentum, and discovered that the Latin Church had borrowed it from everyday life in the Roman army, where it had meant a soldier’s oath. That struck a strong chord in Switzerland, where regular swearing of oaths was the foundational to a society whose strength came from mutual interdependence and local loyalty. It also resonated with that ancient Hebrew idea which has repeatedly sounded anew for Christians: covenant. loc: 11406   

So the sacrament of Eucharist was not a magical talisman of Christ’s body. It was a community pledge, loc: 11409   

The Eucharist could indeed be a sacrifice, but one of faith and thankfulness by a Christian to God, a way of remembering what Jesus had done for humanity on the Cross, and all the Gospel promises which followed on from it in scripture. And what was true for the Eucharist must be true for the other biblical sacrament, baptism. This was a welcome for children into the Lord’s family the Church; it did not involve magical washing away of sin. loc: 11411   

sacraments shifted in meaning from something which God did for humanity, to something which humanity did for God. loc: 11414   

sacraments [were] intimately linked with the shared life of a proud city. The Eucharist was the community meeting in love, baptism was the community extending a welcome. This nobly coherent vision of a better Israel, faithful to God’s covenant, loc: 11415   

Luther, as much as Zwingli, found that he was reliant on German princes for help in two directions: first, against ordinary people who did not want to be reformed and who needed orders from princes to move them along; second, against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had outlawed him after Worms, and who now wished to destroy him and his whole programme. loc: 11422   

when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants, loc: 11425   

‘Augsburg Confession’ [was] as their flagship statement of faith. loc: 11429   

REFORMATIONS RADICAL AND MAGISTERIAL: ANABAPTISTS AND HENRY VIII loc: 11429   

Instead a ‘magisterial’ Reformation was created: these were the Protestant movements led by the magistri, the theologically educated masters, and magistrates of all descriptions - kings, princes, city councils. loc: 11432   

sacraments were pledges of faith by Christian believers who had already received God’s gift of saving faith, surely Christian baptism ought to be a conscious act of faith by the person baptized loc: 11437   

Because the radicals sought to give a new and genuine baptism to those who had been baptized as infants, their enemies called them in cod-Greek ‘rebaptizers’ or Anabaptists. loc: 11441   

contradicted another axiom of his thought, that the Church of Zürich embraced the whole city of Zürich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. loc: 11444   

Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. loc: 11448   

So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. loc: 11455   

returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. loc: 11460   

radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the Last Days. loc: 11465   

in the early 1530s, groups from the Low Countries began joining with other radicals in converging on the western German city of Münster. loc: 11467   

radicals’ revolution turned to nightmare. loc: 11470   

Radicalism thereafter turned from militancy to quiet escapes from ordinary society, tolerated by some rulers who recognized that such gathered communities were actually industrious and honest-dealing. Yet Münster remained as a constant dark memory: peaceable, inoffensive Anabaptists were burned and harried because of what John of Leyden had done.25 loc: 11472   

general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine’s alliance with Christianity. loc: 11478   

Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church’s doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine’s seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214-15), and if that was so, all such doctrine was ripe for reassessment. loc: 11479   

Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a ‘paper Pope’, and affirmed that God spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through ‘inner light’. loc: 11483   

magisterial Reformers went on battling for the minds of rulers, loc: 11487   

succeeded in much of Germany and Scandinavia; they failed in Jagiellon Poland, Valois France and the Habsburg lands. loc: 11488   

through much of central Europe, nobility were receptive where monarchs were not, sensing the advantages of challenging the religion of their overlords. loc: 11489   

In central Europe, a defining catastrophe for traditional authority was the Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526, loc: 11494   

Quite apart from the shattering of a ruling elite, the blow to the old religion’s prestige was severe; loc: 11497   

[When Henry VIII tried to annul his marriage with Catherine] Clement VII was under pressure from Queen Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was rather nearer to hand than the King of England, and who in 1527 had demonstrated what that might mean when his soldiers (mostly Lutheran sympathizers) rampaged through Rome itself uncontrolled for weeks on end, bringing horror and chaos within earshot of the terrified Pope loc: 11503   

Henry, increasingly convinced that the Pope was God’s enemy as well as England’s in denying him his annulment, conceived the idea of repudiating papal jurisdiction. He was the first king in Europe to do so, and loc: 11506   

from 1534 Cromwell and Cranmer discreetly encouraged a piecemeal dismantling of the old Church, loc: 11512   

Tyndale, an Oxford scholar from Gloucestershire, made the English Bible his life’s work, had to flee his native land to continue his labours on it and lost his life because of it. loc: 11522   

The New Testament which Tyndale prepared first had an immediate impact when clandestine copies arrived in England in 1526-7: nothing else was so important in creating a popular English Reformation which was independent of King Henry’s whims. loc: 11537   

the King came to authorize the translation made by the man whose murder he had in effect arranged. loc: 11541   

By the time King Henry died in 1547, England’s traditional religion was under severe attack. The Bible was now available to Henry’s subjects in a complete version created by English evangelicals loc: 11545   

the King sought to ban his less well-educated subjects from reading it, deeply troubled at the possibility that they might have radical thoughts as a result of irresponsible thumbing through its pages. loc: 11548   

closure of all monasteries, nunneries and friaries in England and Wales (1532-40). loc: 11550   

systematic dissolution of chantry foundations, although they did not give ideological reasons for what they were doing, simply announcing that King Henry needed the money.33 The way lay open in 1547 to a more coherently ideological Reformation for England, presided over enthusiastically by Henry’s young son, Edward VI.34 loc: 11553   

Catholic cantons of Switzerland defeated Zürich’s armies on its border at Kappel in 1531, loc: 11559   

STRASSBURG, ENGLAND AND GENEVA (1540-60) loc: 11567   

led by a former Dominican friar, Martin Bucer. Until the middle of the century, it looked as if Strassburg would become the centre of the future Reformation, for Bucer was a self-proclaimed (though fatally verbose) broker of consensus amid the Reformers’ disagreements, and the city lay at the heart of European trade and culture. loc: 11570   

Strassburg was soon to fall away from European leadership because of military defeat, loc: 11574   

With the failure of discussions between Protestants and Catholics around the imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1541 (see pp. 662-3), the time for humanist moderation was evidently past; loc: 11581   

in 1545 a council of the Western Church convened by the Pope at last began meeting at Trent, in a mood of aggressive confidence, to take new initiatives in the papal Church. loc: 11583   

The Holy Roman Emperor confronted the military alliance formed by his Lutheran princes, the ‘Schmalkaldic League’, and in 1547 roundly defeated them loc: 11585   

Bucer hastily left Strassburg for England, [where a ] group of politicians ruling in the name of Henry VIII’s young son, Edward VI, after Henry’s death in 1547 now had the chance to propel England into the leadership of the Reformation throughout Europe. Archbishop Cranmer, one of their number and now a hardened political operator, led a thoroughgoing destruction of the traditional devotional world in England. loc: 11588   

Consequently the English Prayer Book, only lightly revised in 1559 and finally given a slightly more Catholic-leaning makeover in 1662, has remained an extraordinarily flexible vehicle for a form of Western Christianity which, in its development as ‘Anglicanism’, has sometimes looked with some distaste on its Reformation inheritance loc: 11594   

The Archbishop bequeathed first England and then the whole world a liturgical drama which he wished to be enacted by all those present in an act of worship; loc: 11603   

Cranmer’s words are the common inheritance of all those who use English, loc: 11607   

With dramatic speed, England rejected Edward’s chosen Protestant successor, his cousin Jane Grey. Against the expectations of English politicians and foreign ambassadors alike, widespread popular fury challenged the deal done in Westminster, more decisively than at any other moment in the Tudor age. Armed demonstrations across south-eastern England forced the kingdom’s leaders to accept the claim to the throne made by the dead king’s Catholic half-sister, the Lady Mary.43 loc: 11629   

She returned an entire kingdom to Roman obedience and the possibility of innovations in Catholic reform. loc: 11634   

she burned at the stake some of the leading English Protestant reformers, Thomas Cranmer included. She also overcame the objections of English politicians to her marriage plans to King Philip II of Spain, which promised to bind the future of her kingdom to the most powerful Catholic monarchy in Europe loc: 11635   

John Calvin.…When the Genevans faced chaos and in desperation called him back, he was ready to build a better Strassburg in Geneva. In a set of Ecclesiastical Ordinances which the city authorities ordered Calvin to draft in 1541, he put into practice a scheme to restructure the Church which Bucer had envisaged for Strassburg: loc: 11643   

four functions of ministry: [pastors took] care of the laity exercised by medieval parish priests and bishops; doctors were responsible for teaching at all levels, loc: 11647   

Together, pastors and senior doctors who were obviously close to them in ministry (notably Calvin himself) formed a Company of Pastors. loc: 11648   

Elders bore the disciplinary work of the Church, leading it alongside the pastors in a Church court called a consistory. loc: 11649   

government by committee; in other contexts, the committees were called presbyteries, loc: 11650   

Genevans never dared lose face by throwing him out a second time, and they were also shrewdly aware that he was good for business. loc: 11656   

Servetus, with the Islamic and Jewish heritage of his country in mind, denied that the conventional notion of the Trinity could be found in the Bible; loc: 11661   

Calvin saw his duty as clear: Servetus must die. loc: 11663   

Thus Calvin established that Protestants were as determined as Catholics to represent the mainstream traditional Christianity which had culminated in the Council of Chalcedon in 451.47 loc: 11664   

Institution of the Christian Religion - commonly known as the Institutes.48 This was designed to lay claim to Catholic Christianity for the Reformation: loc: 11666   

‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves’.49 loc: 11671   

scrutinizing ourselves honestly after contemplating God is bound to shame us. None of our capacities can lift us from this abyss in our fallen state, only an act of free grace from God. This is Augustine restated, loc: 11673   

For Calvin this ‘double knowledge’ (duplex cognitio) lay at the heart of Catholic Christianity, loc: 11675   

If salvation was entirely in God’s hands, as Luther said, and human works were of no avail, then logically God took decisions on individual salvation without reference to an individual’s life-story. God decided to save some and logically also to consign others to damnation. loc: 11679   

Evidently those who did not listen to and act on the Word were among the damned; loc: 11681   

The good news was that the elect of God could not lose their salvation. loc: 11682   

Central to his vision of a renewed Catholic Church based on the achievement of the early centuries was the Council of Chalcedon’s careful crafting of the ‘Chalcedonian Definition’. Christ was one person in two natures inextricably linked - God the Son and so fully part of the Divine Trinity, while at the same time Jesus the human being, born in Palestine. loc: 11686   

Chalcedon had a particular significance for magisterial Protestants, who saw it as the last general council of the Church to make reliable decisions about doctrine in accordance with the core doctrines proclaimed in scripture - they were all the more inclined to respect the early councils because radicals rejected that legacy loc: 11688   

distinction but not separation (distinctio sed non separatio).…Above all, it structures what Calvin says about the Eucharist. He made a firm distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘sign’ which nevertheless would not separate them completely. loc: 11695   

old Church betrayed this principle by confusing reality and sign, attributing to the signs of bread and wine worship which was only due to the reality behind them. loc: 11697   

In the Eucharist, God does not come down to us to sit on a table; but through the sign of the breaking of bread and taking of wine, he draws us up to join him in Heaven. loc: 11702   

mid-century attempt to unite Protestantism against the Roman menace only resulted in a deeper divide among Protestants. loc: 11712   

sealed the boundaries of Lutheran identity by a Formula of Concord in 1577, confirmed by a Book of Concord in 1580. loc: 11715   

as time went on, the Reformed sponsored a number of efforts at reunion, galvanized by the increasing effectiveness of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, but the habitual response among Lutherans was offensive and verbose rejection.54 loc: 11720   

the powerful prose and driving intellectual energy of Calvin’s Institutes inspired a variety of Churches who felt that Luther’s Reformation had not gone far enough. Other major theologians lined up with Calvin against dogmatic Lutheranism, loc: 11722   

Reformed Christianity saved the Reformation from its mid-century phase of hesitation and disappointment. loc: 11732   

REFORMED PROTESTANTS, CONFESSIONALIZATION AND TOLERATION (1560-1660) loc: 11735   

as he built his Church in Geneva, he was much more careful than Luther or Zwingli to keep Church structures separate from the existing city authorities. loc: 11738   

To Calvin’s alarm, he found that in the Netherlands, Scotland and France, he had sponsored movements of revolution, people inspired by the thought that they were the elect army of God whose duty was to take on Antichrist. loc: 11742   

Noblemen could harness traditional loyalties alongside the destructive enthusiasm of Protestant mobs who wanted physically to smash the old Church. Crowds determined to fight the Antichrist shattered stained-glass windows and hurled down statues, loc: 11746   

Music was the secret weapon of popular reformation. Singing or even humming or whistling the telltale tunes spread where preaching dared not go, and where books might be incriminating. The political effect was startling. loc: 11750   

Reformed activists in Scotland…a Church exercising discipline within society like the Genevan Consistory, but its very public discipline, loc: 11756   

Reformed discipline provided structures for controlling a frighteningly violent and arbitrary world, and involved the whole community in doing so.57 loc: 11760   

When her half-sister Mary’s death in 1558 delivered the realm into Elizabeth’s hands, her new religious settlement of 1559 restored a fossilized version of Edward VI’s half-finished religious revolution loc: 11766   

Many of Elizabeth’s activist Reformed Protestant subjects could see no reason why it should remain fossilized or half-finished, and kept up pressure on her for more change. Increasingly those who were prepared to conform to the Queen’s wishes named the discontented, in no friendly spirit, ‘Puritans’.58 loc: 11767   

As a result of this north-south divide, people were forced to make decisions, or at least their rulers forced decisions on them. Which checklist of doctrine should they sign up to? loc: 11776   

confessionalization - creating fixed identities and systems of belief for separate Churches which had previously been more fluid in their self-understanding, and which had not even sought separate identities for themselves.59 Confessionalization represents the defeat of efforts to rebuild the unified Latin Church. loc: 11778   

the northern Netherlands. Having thrown off one clerical tyranny and jealously guarding a host of local autonomies, the secular rulers (the ‘regents’) of this new republic were not going to allow their Reformed clergy to establish a real monopoly of religious practice. Dutch people were free to ignore the life of their parish churches, as long as they did not cause trouble; loc: 11786   

Otherwise, it was in eastern Europe that the most practical and official arrangements were made for religious coexistence loc: 11789   

the Transylvanian Diet decided that it was impossible to reconcile the various factions and instead it would recognize their legal existence. loc: 11797   

no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.61 loc: 11802   

This was the first time that radical Christian communities had been officially recognized in sixteenth-century Europe loc: 11804   

Yet even when the Catholic Habsburgs acquired the territory and did their best to chip away at its religious liberties, the Torda agreement obstinately left its mark on Transylvania’s religious landscape. loc: 11814   

Transylvania’s initiative was soon followed by Poland-Lithuania, albeit with very different end results. loc: 11820   

Anti-Trinitarian radicals in their own ‘Minor’ or Arian Church enjoyed a more open life than any similar group in Europe except for their near allies in Transylvania. loc: 11828   

in 1569 the anti-Trinitarians were even able to open their own institution of higher education in Poland, the Raków Academy, complete with printing press: loc: 11833   

It represented the most thoroughgoing challenge so far to sixteenth-century Europe’s hierarchical assumptions, loc: 11838   

leaders launched political changes with profound implications for the future of the region. First came the restructuring of their polity in the Union of Lublin of 1569 (see p. 533) and then an opportunity to enshrine religious pluralism in the constitution of the commonwealth. loc: 11847   

a meeting of the Sejm (Diet or Assembly) in Warsaw in 1573, at which a clause on religious freedom was unanimously approved in the agreement (‘Confederation’) proposed with the new king. loc: 11857   

While the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth endured, the Confederation remained a cornerstone of its political and religious life. loc: 11866   

REFORMATION CRISES: THE THIRTY YEARS WAR AND BRITAIN loc: 11872   

the Peace of Augsburg between the Habsburgs and Protestants in 1555 established for the first time a reluctant recognition by a Catholic monarch of a legal existence for Protestants. loc: 11875   

each ruler could decide on which side of the Reformation divide his territory and subjects were to fall: loc: 11877   

The 1555 settlement reflected the realities of the Schmalkaldic Wars: the bulk of Protestants fighting the Catholics had been Lutherans, and the only two permissible religions of the empire were papal Catholicism and Lutheranism. loc: 11880   

accession of a serious-minded new monarch in the Palatinate who adhered to neither of these confessions. loc: 11882   

other German princes followed his example in turning away from increasingly dogmatic Lutheranism towards the creation of Reformed Church polities, loc: 11885   

The Reformed were confronting Lutheran Churches which, amid an enormous diversity of traditional practice, seemed to have become the shelter for traditional religion loc: 11890   

This instability was the background to the eventual outbreak of continent-wide war, and the flashpoint was the kingdom of Bohemia, loc: 11900   

Bohemians had stonily preserved their established Hussite or ‘Utraquist’ Church, loc: 11901   

Bohemian nobility elected as the next king of Bohemia, in preference to the Catholic Habsburg claimant, the Elector Palatine, Friedrich V. loc: 11907   

The Habsburgs reacted quickly to this hammer-blow to their power, and their reconquest of Bohemia proved unexpectedly easy. loc: 11912   

Immediately the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand began dismantling a century of safeguards for Protestantism loc: 11915   

beginning of a successful effort to install the most flamboyant variety of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as an almost monopoly religion in the Habsburg heartlands, loc: 11917   

Protestants were alarmed at the intransigent terms of Ferdinand’s Edict of Restitution in 1629, which restored lands to the old Church lost even before the Peace of Augsburg, and virtually outlawed Reformed Christianity in the empire: loc: 11921   

Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden both intervened in wars which proved so destructive and prolonged that it was only in 1648 that the exhausted powers were able to agree on the Treaty of Westphalia to end the Thirty Years War. loc: 11923   

strongly in the sacred reality and God-given destiny of the Holy Roman Empire: loc: 11927   

After 1648, there was no prospect that this foundational institution of medieval Western Christendom would ever become a coherent, bureaucratic and centralized state, loc: 11930   

Christian rulers would have to devise other ways of understanding how and why they ruled. loc: 11932   

dynastic quirks delivered Ireland and England into the impatient hands of James VI of Scotland loc: 11937   

James was himself a devout Reformed Protestant who had done his best to cope with (and curb) a Reformed Church of Scotland convinced that it had the God-given right to tell him what to do. He had been inclined to disparage the Church of England, loc: 11939   

as James I of England, he found himself enthusiastic for the Church of England. loc: 11946   

it had retained not only bishops (Scotland had bishops too, after a fashion), but fully functioning cathedrals, with a positively medieval apparatus of worship: loc: 11949   

they emphasized the solemn performance of public liturgy and the offering of beautiful music in settings of restrained beauty as the most fitting approaches to God in worship. They spoke much of the value of the sacraments: loc: 11953   

more clerical in their outlook loc: 11956   

held little respect for the Reformed scheme of salvation which stressed predestination, loc: 11957   

Arminians defined all who disagreed with them, all the way up to bishops and noblemen, as ‘Puritans’, loc: 11961   

Charles I,…authoritarian by nature, and his reaction to opposition was to become not merely more authoritarian, but distinctly devious in his attempts to get his way. loc: 11972   

new king had a soulmate in one particularly busy, conscientious and tidy-minded sacramentalist who was a former Oxford academic, William Laud, loc: 11974   

He made matters worse by genuinely believing that anyone in the Church who disagreed with him was part of a single ‘Puritan’ conspiracy; his high-handed reactions against this imaginary network infuriated enough Protestants in England for the label ‘Puritan’ to be worn for the first time as a badge of pride, loc: 11977   

Charles and Laud alienated leaders in the three kingdoms to such an extent that rebellions broke out, loc: 11993   

Finally in 1642 came civil war in England, between forces led by a majority of the English Parliament in Westminster and supporters of the King, who felt that such opposition was a fight against God’s anointed, loc: 11995   

trigger for war was stark disagreement as to whether Charles could be trusted to lead armies against Irish Catholics, loc: 11997   

In the course of the war, episcopacy in Scotland and England was abolished, along with the Book of Common Prayer. loc: 12002   

question was now whether a strict version of Scottish presbyterianism would be set up in England, or some looser system of Church government. loc: 12003   

The Republic’s armies were so successful that, in the decade after 1650, they united the Atlantic archipelago in a single political unit for the first time in its history. loc: 12011   

The successive Puritan regimes were too straitlaced for the people of England and they could find no popular political substitute for the monarchy. loc: 12015   

it tolerated with different degrees of reluctance a variety of radical sects who were widely seen as offending against all convention. loc: 12019   

English Baptists, who took up the principle of adult or believers’ baptism loc: 12020   

huge offence to the vast majority who took it for granted that a Christian society depended on all its members being baptized in infancy. loc: 12022   

‘Ranters’: …God’s free grace was the only source of salvation. That freed all the saved from any law, human or divine, or (if God were truly to be glorified) from good behaviour at all. This was the ‘antinomian’ conclusion (nomos is a Greek word for ‘law’ - hence antinomianism is ‘against law’) which had haunted the respectable magisterial Reformation from its earliest days. God-given antinomian freedom might be expressed by such gestures as ecstatic blasphemy, joyous tobacco-smoking and running naked down the street. loc: 12026   

Quakers. Their conviction of their special role in God’s purposes and of their ‘inner light’ led them to disrupt public worship and refuse to doff their hats to social superiors, among many signs of contempt for the norms of ordinary society. loc: 12032   

after two years of increasing disorder, maypoles, Christmas and King Charles II were all summoned back from exile.80 loc: 12036   

the Church Settlement of 1662, with a revamped version of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, excluded many Protestants who before the civil wars would have found a home within the national Church; now they were labelled Dissenters, whether they liked it or not. loc: 12039   

a new identity was born for the Churches of England and Ireland, which was occasionally at the time called Anglican, a term which came to be much more widely used in the nineteenth century. Alongside Anglicanism was a strong and irrepressible Protestant Dissent.81 loc: 12042   

Topic: Chapter 18 Rome’s Renewal (1500-1700)

18 Rome’s Renewal (1500-1700) loc: 12059

CROSS-CURRENTS IN SPAIN AND ITALY: VALDESIANS AND JESUITS (1500-1540) loc: 12061   

Juan [de Valdes] had judged that a voyage to Italy might enhance his likelihood of avoiding a fiery death, and he never returned to Spain. loc: 12072   

Gilds, more commonly known here as brotherhoods or confraternities, flourished in Italy as they had done for centuries. Their popularity has been seen as the chief reason why Italians had so little investment in the anti-clerical rhetoric common in northern Europe, loc: 12076   

Ettore Vernazza, a layman from Genoa, founded a confraternity which he called the Oratory of Divine Love.…reverence for the Eucharist and with comforting and helping the sick, loc: 12082   

Several leaders prominent in the Italian Church’s later recovery of nerve against the Reformation learned pious activism in oratories, and some extended this into the renewal of various religious orders. loc: 12086   

a cultured English émigré, Reginald Pole. Pole was born with a rather better hereditary claim to the throne of England loc: 12102   

only virgin women - not even widows - could join.…symbolic patron a supposed fourth-century martyr, St Ursula.…concentrating on working among the poor and teaching children in settings which men either did not want to or could not enter. loc: 12115   

Juan de Valdés eventually settled in Naples, Spanish-governed but happily free from the Spanish Inquisition, where from his arrival in 1535 he developed a circle of friends, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and for promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith. loc: 12122   

central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace. loc: 12135   

Spirituali,…parted company with north European evangelicals in his belief that the Spirit progressively offered its light to Christians: he believed that some favoured children of God would be led to ever deeper union with Christ, and the scriptures might not be the only or chief illumination on the way. loc: 12141   

Among the Valdesians, Vittoria Colonna became the subject of discreet pressure from Reginald Pole, who urged this prominent patron of the Spirituali more fully to acknowledge that the institutional structures of the Church were of vital importance in the Christian life. loc: 12146   

Senior clerics sympathetic to Carafa’s bleakly rigorist and authoritarian style of Catholic reform have often been described as the Zelanti (‘the zealous ones’). loc: 12163   

Spirituali and Zelanti, but the descriptions still have some value in identifying two polarities while clergy and theologians argued about the best way to save the Church. loc: 12165   

Amid many painful and poverty-stricken false starts, Loyola began to note down his changing spiritual experiences. This was raw material for a systematically organized guide to prayer, self-examination and surrender to divine power. He soon began using the system with other people. loc: 12175   

Spanish Inquisition’s unfavourable interest in this devotional activity which led to Loyola’s hasty exit from Spain loc: 12181   

vision for a new mission to the Holy Land. loc: 12183   

REGENSBURG AND TRENT, A CONTEST RESOLVED (1541-59) loc: 12198   

against Cardinal Contarini’s energetic efforts to find common ground with Protestants, particularly on justification by faith, was ranged the hostility of Cardinal Carafa to any such concession. loc: 12200   

Contarini died a bitterly disappointed man under house arrest. After that, some of the more exposed leaders of the Spirituali fled north to shelter with Protestants. loc: 12205   

soon they and the intellectuals they financed were bringing a remarkable variety of religious views and free-thinking to the Reformed lands of eastern and northern Europe, loc: 12209   

Roman Inquisition, modelled on the Spanish Inquisition…determine what the norm for theology was within the Catholic Church. loc: 12215   

much less incentive now for remaining Spirituali to feel any commitment to the traditional Church.…exclusion of the Spirituali from the future of the Catholic Church.10 loc: 12229   

Trent in the Tyrol. The episcopal host and chairman from 1545,…council’s decrees rained down to shut out compromise. loc: 12234   

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. loc: 12234   

Then came a decree on justification which achieved the remarkable feat of using Augustine’s language and concepts to exclude Luther’s theology of salvation, particularly his assertion that sinful humanity cannot please God by any fulfilment of divine law. loc: 12236   

There was a distinct possibility that Pole might become pope - the dying pontiff had been one of those recommending him - but Carafa’s dramatic intervention with charges of heresy against the Englishman turned a series of close votes away from him loc: 12239   

with Pole’s defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved. loc: 12246   

the Medici were paying for a new scheme of fresco decoration for the choir and family chapels in their ancestral parish church of San Lorenzo, one of Florence’s oldest and most famous churches. Their frescoes were an open declaration of support for evangelical reform in the Catholic Church. loc: 12252   

What it did draw on were themes from the Catechism of Valdés, already prohibited in 1549 by the authorities in Venice, later also by the Roman Inquisition - images which clearly pointed those with eyes to see to the doctrine of justification by faith. loc: 12256   

early development of the Jesuits. It is no coincidence that they remained aloof from the work of the Inquisitions, conscious of the harassment which their founder had suffered…They more or less sleepwalked into one of their future chief occupations, secondary and higher education.…They quickly set up ‘colleges’ in certain university towns, originally just intended as lodging places for student members of the Society. loc: 12269   

It was very difficult for children of the poor to get the necessary primary grounding to enter schools at such an advanced level; so without any single policy decision, a Jesuit educational mission emerged to secure the next generation of merchants, gentry and nobility - in other words, the people who mattered in converting Europe back to Catholic obedience. loc: 12274   

Jesuits allied with another unconventional religious organization, the Ursulines, and steered Ursuline energies towards parallel female education, loc: 12276   

they refused to require a distinct dress or habit for members, nor were they even necessarily ordained, despite the fact that their core tasks, preaching and hearing confessions, were the same as the orders of friars. loc: 12281   

They did not wish to become an enclosed monastic order because Ignatius passionately wanted to affirm the value of the world, and believed that it was possible to lead a fully spiritual life within it. loc: 12286   

Ignatius delicately finessed the Society’s constitution so that it was clearly understood that the Superior-General and not the pope was responsible for directing Jesuit mission policy.14 loc: 12289   

Central was a new stress on a mission which seemed urgent after the Peace of Augsburg had recognized the existence of Lutheranism in 1555 (see p. 644). In a revised statement of purpose in 1550, the Society had added to ‘propagation of the faith’ the idea of ‘defence’ - that is, confronting Protestants.…deliberately promoted the idea that the Society had been founded to combat the Reformation.15 loc: 12299   

COUNTER-REFORMATIONS AFTER TRENT: ENGLAND, SPAIN AND THE MYSTICS loc: 12300   

By the end of 1563 it had completed its work, producing a coherent programme for a Catholicism conveniently labelled ‘Tridentine’,…a uniform catechism of the Catholic faith, and a uniform liturgy: loc: 12305   

Tridentine liturgy remained in Latin and not, like Protestant worship, in vernacular languages, loc: 12307   

commendation of obligatory celibacy loc: 12311   

necessary debate about the nature of ordination - had the office of bishop been constituted by Christ or by the Church in its early development? loc: 12316   

implied that the authority of bishops came from the pope, successor of Peter, chosen by Christ to be the rock on which he built his Church (Matthew 16.18), rather than that every bishop was a direct representative of Christ’s authority. loc: 12317   

masterly drafting to create a formula which would not definitively place exclusive divine authority in either the papacy or the general body of the episcopate. loc: 12320   

In practice, many centralizing reforms later in the century put the advantage in the hands of the papacy, particularly because these reforms gave the pope and his officials prime responsibility for interpreting what the decrees and canons of Trent actually meant. loc: 12321   

the first Vatican Council of 1870 formally made the resolution in favour of papal primacy which had been impossible in the 1560s loc: 12323   

Pole was now back in his native land, having succeeded the executed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. loc: 12333   

Mary, devout daughter of the Church, found herself in the crazy position of defying the Pope and forbidding Pole to leave her realm for what would almost certainly have been a heretic’s death in Rome. loc: 12335   

creative re-examination reveals Mary’s Church as a forerunner of much which happened in the Tridentine world, loc: 12339   

Pole sorted out decades of deteriorating Church finance and pioneered new eucharistic devotions; his bishops encouraged preaching and published official sermons to match those of Protestants, and crucially set out to implement a programme of clergy training schools, seminaries, for each diocese: the first time that the Catholic Church had seriously addressed the problem of equipping a parish clergy to equal the developing articulacy of Protestant ministers. loc: 12343   

Jesuits actually arrived in 1558 poised for action, only to be pre-empted by Mary’s death.19 English Catholicism now faced a disaster, loc: 12349   

Instead, the new queen, last of the Tudors, was Protestant Elizabeth, loc: 12352   

Jesuits were banned from the realm, together with all other Catholic clergy trained abroad, loc: 12353   

Jesuit and non-Jesuit clergy alike patiently and heroically built up a community of Catholics, led by gentry families scattered throughout England and Wales. It survived Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and persisted through seventeenth-century persecutions and eighteenth-century marginalization, loc: 12356   

With England lost, and most of northern Europe in Protestant hands, Tridentine Catholicism looked to Habsburg power. loc: 12368   

Austrian Habsburgs were themselves divided. Ferdinand I was mindful of the Habsburgs’ recent defeat at the hands of Lutheran princes of the empire which had forced him to sign the Peace of Augsburg loc: 12372   

ruler over three powerful varieties of Western Christianity: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Bohemian Utraquist Hussitism. loc: 12374   

Maximilian II sought accommodations with Lutherans, loc: 12375   

Maximilian’s younger brother Archduke Ferdinand felt very differently, and he implemented an aggressive Catholic agenda…encouraged the Jesuits to set up institutions in towns and cities under their control, loc: 12380   

King Philip II of Spain, freed by bereavement from his unexciting and ultimately embarrassing marriage to Queen Mary of England, returned to Spain in 1559 to sort out a rising tide of turbulence and financial chaos; in tackling this, he saw the Spanish Inquisition as a chief ally. loc: 12382   

Philip and his government committed themselves to the proposition that there was only one way to be a Spaniard: a traditionalist Catholic, loc: 12388   

Some unlikely figures became victims of the Inquisition’s implementation of the policy. The Society of Jesus was still as much an object of suspicion loc: 12391   

Also troubled by Spanish officialdom were two religious later to become among the most famous personalities in the history of Christian mysticism, Teresa of Ávila and Juan de Yepes (John of the Cross). loc: 12402   

Teresa sought to bring the Carmelites to realize more intensely the significance of their origins in the wilderness by a refoundation of the order in which the men and women of the Reform would walk barefoot (Discalced). loc: 12406   

Teresa certainly spoke of her meetings with the divine in the passionate and intimate terms that mystics (mostly but not exclusively female) had employed for centuries. She spoke of the piercing of her heart, of her mystical marriage with the divine,…grittily insisted that women had something distinctive to say, and that it was their Saviour who made them say it: loc: 12424   

For both Teresa and Juan, the erotic biblical poem the Song of Songs became a key text for the divine revelation. loc: 12426   

Juan was not afraid of repeatedly picturing himself as the lover, and frequently the bride, of Christ, loc: 12427   

He spoke not only of love in such very physical modes, but also searingly explored the ultimate loneliness of humanity - the loneliness and sense of rejection loc: 12441   

Dark Night of the Soul was the culmination of the treatise which he called The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The Ascent described this ‘dark night’ as the third stage of the soul’s experience after its early sensuality and subsequent purification,…purgative contemplation, which causes passively in the soul the negation of itself loc: 12450   

After all the conflicts which Teresa and Juan experienced and to some extent initiated, the Discalced Carmelites were left flourishing, backed at the highest levels of Spanish society. loc: 12454   

Teresa co-patron of Spain, loc: 12459   

TRENT DELAYED: FRANCE AND POLAND-LITHUANIA loc: 12461   

Circumstances nevertheless conspired long to prevent the French Church implementing the major decisions made at the Council of Trent on such vital matters as uniformity of worship, doctrinal instruction and clergy training and discipline. loc: 12464   

Queen Catherine de’ Medici’s real talents for government were not equal to the dire religious crisis which then engulfed France and led to four decades of frequently atrocious civil war between Catholics and Protestants loc: 12468   

Henri of Navarre, who in the end was able to unite moderate (‘politique’) Catholics behind him against the ultra-Catholic Ligue (League), after his adroit conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. loc: 12480   

in 1593, Navarre, now Henri IV of France, is often said to have mused, ‘Paris is worth a Mass.’ loc: 12482   

encapsulates a vital moment in the Reformation. In its weary rejection of rigid religious principle, the phrase echoes what many of Europe’s politicians and rulers felt after seventy years of religious warfare across Europe.35 loc: 12484   

in 1598 Henri brokered a settlement, the Edict of Nantes,…Huguenots had not universal toleration but a guaranteed privileged corporate status within the realm, with their own churches and fortified places. loc: 12488   

France represented western Europe’s most large-scale example of religious pluralism, loc: 12490   

Henri, Duke of Anjou. We have met Henri in Poland, as the distinctly unwilling agent in 1573 of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s remarkable enactment of religious toleration, the Confederation of Warsaw loc: 12493   

only a few months after his coronation in Cracow, he received astonishing news: his brother Charles IX of France was dead and consequently he had become King of France, as Henri III. loc: 12498   

After two years of political chaos, a replacement candidate emerged who could once more block the Habsburgs: István Báthori, the current Prince of Transylvania, better known when King of Poland as Stefan Bathory.37 loc: 12501   

it was from Bathory’s reign that the demoralized and divided Catholic Church in the Commonwealth began consolidating its position which eventually produced one of the very few successes for Catholic recovery in northern Europe. loc: 12506   

1564, the Society of Jesus had established a foothold in Poland. Now King Stefan was responsible for founding three major Jesuit colleges loc: 12512   

by the early seventeenth century, every important town (more than two dozen scattered throughout the Commonwealth) had a Jesuit school. Lutheran, Reformed and anti-Trinitarian schools could not compete with such large-scale educational enterprise. loc: 12514   

Dominicans’ consistent and open hostility to the Jesuits demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to be a good Catholic and still detest the Society of Jesus: one did not have to go over to the Protestant side.38 loc: 12526   

Equally significant was King Sigismund III’s triumphant Catholic diplomacy which led to the creation of the Greek Catholic Church in the Commonwealth loc: 12528   

Ultimately they had the choice of placing their faith in the Society of Jesus, applauding cussed Dominican harassment of the Society, or exercising their religion in churches of Orthodox tradition, loc: 12532   

Catholic Church increasingly flourished in its diversity, while a long slow decay affected the divided ranks of the Protestants in the Commonwealth. loc: 12534   

kings of Sweden a claim to the Polish throne, ranged Lutheran Sweden against Poland in war. It was easy in that traumatic era to see Protestantism as an enemy of the Commonwealth’s independence. The Socinians were expelled en masse from the Commonwealth in 1660, loc: 12536   

new intolerance in Poland-Lithuania came amid the growing stream of conversions back to Catholicism among its Protestant elites. loc: 12539   

When the political institutions of Poland-Lithuania were wrecked and then utterly destroyed by the selfish acquisitiveness of eighteenth-century monarchs in Prussia, Russia and Austria, the Catholic Church was all the Poles and Lithuanians had left to carry forward the identity of their once-mighty commonwealth. loc: 12541   

LIVES SEPARATED: SAINTS, SPLENDOUR, SEX AND WITCHES loc: 12547   

produced a rift in the rhythms of life to a degree without parallel in Christian history. The shape of the year became experienced in very different ways in Protestant and Catholic regions. loc: 12549   

holidays ceased to be the ‘holy days’ of the saints and some (usually not many) were reinvented as Protestant feasts. loc: 12551   

By contrast, the Europe loyal to Rome discovered new saints and festivals to emphasize that loyalty. loc: 12554   

In most Reformed Churches, it quickly became the norm to lock church buildings between services to discourage superstitious devotions by individuals who did not have the benefit of community instruction from the pulpit loc: 12560   

drastic slimming down of the Protestant ministry in the interests of greater professionalism in preaching: churches were there for sermons and the occasional community Eucharist. loc: 12562   

Catholic churches continued as in the pre-Reformation past to be open and available for private devotions between the frequent communal liturgical acts. As before, there would be plenty of clergy for laypeople to encounter on the premises. Priest-confessors would commonly be available to relieve afflicted consciences, loc: 12566   

Catholics realized that splendour was one of their chief assets. Worship in Catholic churches became ever more expressive of the power and magnificence of the Church, as a backdrop to feast and fast. loc: 12577   

The city of Rome, enhanced by its newly discovered martyrs and receiving crowds of pilgrims to its ancient holy places, was the greatest of all these Catholic theatre sets. It now became ever more stately after centuries of decay, loc: 12578   

Jesuits became actors and showmen: their visit must be a heart-stopping special occasion, bringing God’s circus to town. This was carnival, but the carnival employed that ultimate carnivalesque reversal of human hierarchies, in which all humanity is laid low in death, as Jesuit preachers pitilessly reminded their enthralled audiences from pulpit or market cross. The Church offered the remedy: its contact with the divine, summed up in the consecrated Host exhibited amid a blaze of candles, promised hope and salvation. loc: 12604   

Gregory XIII, took it upon himself, with the new-found papal confidence of the Counter-Reformation, to reform the deficiencies of the existing Julian calendar, from 15 October 1582. loc: 12611   

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. loc: 12622   

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, loc: 12624   

he set to work in house arrest secretly producing a new version, calmly discussing the physics of motion. This last work before his death was perhaps his greatest contribution to Western thought: an enterprise of truly rational investigation of empirical evidence, ignoring the pressure from powerful traditional authority. It anticipated the detached investigation of phenomena which has become one of the hallmarks of Europe’s Enlightenment culture. loc: 12629   

Protestants generally were more inclined to tolerate Jews because they found Jewish biblical scholarship a useful tool against Catholics. loc: 12639   

Europe became a newly intensively regulated society, as Catholics and Protestants vied with each other to show just how moral a society they could create. loc: 12643   

Reformation and much to do with that newly rampant sexually transmitted disease syphilis, which generated much anxiety about social habits. loc: 12649   

Both sides of the religious divide energetically shut down the brothels which the medieval Church had licensed as a safety valve for society loc: 12657   

Both sides stepped up the pressures to suppress male homosexuality, loc: 12659   

Protestants could point to an innovation which was distinctly theirs in Western Christendom, and which overall proved a real success: their reestablishment of the clerical family. The parsonage was a new model for Europe’s family life. loc: 12661   

children grew up there surrounded by books and earnest conversation, inheriting the assumption that life was to be lived strenuously for the benefit of an entire community - not least in telling that community what to do, whether the advice was welcome or not. loc: 12663   

clerical and academic dynasties quickly grew up in Protestant Europe, and that thoughtful and often troubled, rather self-conscious parsonage children took their place in a wider service. loc: 12665   

Both sides, with honourable exceptions such as Martin Luther and the Spanish Inquisition (an unpredictable combination), moved from the general medieval belief in witches to a new pursuit, persecution and execution of people thought to be witches. loc: 12670   

It is remarkable how seriously Protestants fearful of witchcraft took a misogynistic and rambling textbook on witchcraft written by two pre-Reformation Dominicans, one of whom, Jacobus Sprenger, had also been instrumental in promoting the Marian devotion of the Rosary: this was the egregious Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’), first published in Strassburg in 1487.48 loc: 12673   

Maybe forty or fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on witchcraft charges between 1400 and 1800,…noticeably from around 1560, at just about the time when large-scale execution of heretics was coming to an end. loc: 12677   

the reality in England that accused were characteristically prosperous or significant figures in their community, though commonly not the most peaceable. loc: 12678   

Ferdinand, Archbishop of Cologne from 1612, was a typical product of the radical Counter-Reformation self-discipline which characterized both his own Wittelsbach dynasty and the more militant Habsburgs in alliance with them loc: 12684   

It has been plausibly suggested that these devoutly Catholic rulers were fighting more than the Protestantism which certainly obsessed them: their Jesuit mentors gave them a preoccupation with sin and judgement, now strengthened for the clergy among them by the new demands of a clerical celibacy much more conscientiously maintained than in the pre-Reformation Church. As Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and an array of conscientious Counter-Reformation bishops struggled with their own temptations, witches became symbols of the general temptations which Satan used to torment society. loc: 12686   

Among Protestants it took one independent-minded Dutch Reformed minister, Balthazar Bekker, to excoriate witch-hunting in an influential book, Bewitched World (1691); this finally shamed many Protestant authorities in Germany into giving up witch trials. loc: 12690   

By the end of the seventeenth century, despite losses to Russian Orthodoxy in the east, far more of the religious life of Europe was under Catholic obedience than in 1600. loc: 12701   

political milestones on that journey: the Union of Brest in 1596, which had seemed to absorb most of the Orthodox of eastern Europe into the Catholic Church; the Battle of White Mountain, which had crushed Bohemian Utraquism in 1620; the Treaty of Westphalia, which restricted Protestant recovery of territory in 1648; the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which repudiated Henri IV’s generous vision of two Christian confessions coexisting in a single kingdom. loc: 12703   

The story was partly of war, high diplomacy, official persecution and coercion; but it was also the result of much patient missionary work, preaching, rebuilding of a devotional life part traditional and part as innovative as anything Protestants did. loc: 12706   

Topic: Chapter 19 A Worldwide Faith (1500-1800)

19 A Worldwide Faith (1500-1800) loc: 12713

IBERIAN EMPIRES: THE WESTERN CHURCH EXPORTED loc: 12714

The Portuguese took the lead: their seafaring expertise was forced on them by their exposed position on the Atlantic seaboard and by their homeland’s agricultural poverty, but they also had a tradition of successful crusading against Islam. They began in North Africa, loc: 12718

Once abroad, the Portuguese turned their crusading ethos to religious intolerance as extreme as anywhere in western Europe. loc: 12724

Goa in 1510, they massacred six thousand Muslims, and by mid-century they had also forbidden the practice of Hinduism in Portuguese royal dominions; for good measure they despised and severely harassed the heretical ‘Nestorian’ Dyophysite Christians of India.1 loc: 12726

Their empire, run on a shoestring, consisted of a motley collection of fortified but under-garrisoned coastal trading posts.…Consequently the Portuguese usually lacked the military power to impose Christianity over widespread territories or on their African or Asian neighbours, with significant consequences for missionary strategy loc: 12731

the bulk of westward activity was Spanish (technically their new dominions became part of the kingdom of Castile), while the Portuguese put most of their efforts into Africa and Asia. loc: 12740

Pope Julius II further granted the Spanish monarchy a Patronato, exclusive rights to preach the Gospel in its new territories: a major step in a gradual papal abdication of real authority within Spanish dominions.…He granted the Portuguese a similar right in their empire, the Padroado, and his successors rapidly regretted both concessions, without being able to withdraw them. Now good intentions clashed with naked greed and brutality. loc: 12747

Many who took part in these unsavoury and unprovoked feats of treachery, theft and genocide saw themselves as agents of the crusade begun back home with the Reconquista, the destruction of Spanish Islam and Judaism. loc: 12761

Very soon the Dominicans began protesting against the vicious treatment of the natives. loc: 12765

The Laws of Burgos tried in 1512 to lay down guidelines for relations, and even created a set of ‘rules of engagement’ for further conquests: newly contacted peoples were to be publicly read (in Spanish) a so-called Requirement, formally explaining the bulls of Alexander VI which granted Spain overlordship of their territory. If they cooperated and agreed that Christianity could freely be taught among them, then no force would be used against them. loc: 12767

the atrocious exploits of Cortés and Pizarro postdated the Laws of Burgos. loc: 12770

Bartolomé de las Casas,…his insistence that native Americans were as rational beings as Spaniards, rather than inferior versions of humanity naturally fitted for slavery, sufficiently impressed the Emperor Charles V that debates were staged at the imperial Spanish capital at Valladolid on the morality of colonization (with inconclusive results). loc: 12774

At one stage he suggested a fateful remedy for the exploitation of native labour: African slaves should be imported to replace natives on plantations, radically extending the slave trade which the Portuguese had pioneered in the previous century. Las Casas eventually realized his mistake, but it was too late.7 Here idealism trying to end one injustice blundered unhappily into colluding with a genocidal crime of three centuries’ duration, whose consequences are still built into the politics of both Americas. loc: 12780

Francisco de Vitoria,…Conventional Christian legal wisdom saw nothing wrong in enslaving non-Christians captured in a just war, but there seemed to Vitoria little that was just in the idea of a crusade, particularly in its exploitation in America. loc: 12787

War was only justified as a response to inflicted wrong, and the various peoples of America had offered no wrong to Spaniards before the Spaniards decided to move in on their territory. loc: 12789

Pope Alexander had no right to grant sovereignty in America to Spaniards in 1493, at the same time as he perfectly legitimately granted them exclusive rights to preach the Gospel. loc: 12794

He was pioneering the concept of a system of international law, based on the older idea of ius gentium (‘the law of peoples/nations’), loc: 12798

His assertions heralded the end of belief in the crusade as a means of extending Western Christendom, loc: 12799

Western European political thought was to develop a relativistic concept of dealing with other cultures and other political units - eventually without reference to their religious beliefs or any sense that one religion was superior to another. Vitoria would have profoundly disapproved of this development, but it emerged as a consequence of Iberian worldwide adventures. loc: 12802

No major native American kingdom succumbed to the Spaniards before disease took hold, but once it had, the effect was crippling, and maybe half the population of the Americas died in the first wave of epidemics. loc: 12809

a powerful argument to bewildered and terrified people that their gods were useless and that the God of the conquerors had won. loc: 12811

COUNTER-REFORMATION IN A NEW WORLD loc: 12816

this mission became one of the most distinctive features of southern European Catholicism, a project of taking Christianity to every continent, which made Roman Catholicism Western Christianity’s largest grouping, loc: 12818

little that Rome could do about mission - at the beginning of the century, the papacy had signed away control of Catholic activity. loc: 12823

Spaniards were very ready to distinguish between tribal societies and the sophistication of city-based cultures with recognizable aristocracies like their own. loc: 12835

In such urban settings, they might very willingly strike marriage alliances with members of the local elites, loc: 12836

conscious appropriation of important pre-Christian sacred sites, neutralizing or converting them by building major churches. loc: 12850

The Spanish mission in America soon became not so much crusade as apocalypse. Franciscans coming from Iberia were particularly prone to the millenarian enthusiasm which gripped southern Europe around 1500, and which the Franciscan Order had so long fostered. They believed that they were living in the End Times and so their task of bringing good news to new peoples was desperately urgent loc: 12873

entirely new pattern of settlements of villages and towns was laid out on a grid plan - again, the ideal plan of a perfect Jerusalem - each centring on a church. loc: 12877

sometimes their very anxiety to destroy the demonic quality of the religion they found affected their message: anxious to banish the worship of the sun, priests appropriated sun imagery to the Christian Eucharist. One result seems to have been a notable stylistic innovation affecting the entire Tridentine Catholic world: eucharistic monstrances loc: 12886

Clerical attitudes to indigenous cults hardened from the 1530s. loc: 12891

missionaries in Yucatan discovered that some of their converts were continuing secretly to practise pre-Conquest religious rites. loc: 12894

Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa set up a local Inquisition which unleashed a campaign of interrogation and torture on the Indio population. loc: 12897

The effect of such disappointments was that Spanish clergy radically limited their trust in the natives. loc: 12900

Indigenous people might become assistants in the liturgy, but never principals…not even allowed to enter religious orders. loc: 12902

serious debates throughout the sixteenth century as to whether natives should be banned from receiving the eucharistic Host loc: 12905

Jesuits treated their hunter-gatherer converts almost as children, organizing them into large settlements to protect them against the greed and exploitation of the other colonists, but always in a benevolent European-led dictatorship of estates, loc: 12908

missionaries realized that after the traumas of the conquest and epidemics, they must show that there was joy and celebration in the new religion.…vibrant indigenous tradition of music in church;…dance,…extrovert art and architecture loc: 12929

Catholic festival days were soon assimilated as community celebrations. loc: 12930

The long-term success of Spanish evangelism in the Americas was to make the Catholic Church both essential in native culture and a tie binding the indigenous peoples to the cultures of southern Europe. loc: 12934

Beyond the sacramental life of the Church, a great deal of this activity was sustained by catechists, native or mixed-race laymen without any right to preside over sacraments, but devoted to repeating in their own communities what they had learned of the faith from clergy, interpreting, visiting, leading prayer. This was something new: there was little known precedent for the importance of catechists in the medieval European Church, loc: 12935

In Mexico, the resulting vernacular culture is symbolized by the centrality to national identity of the Virgin of Guadalupe. loc: 12938

perfectly united old and new Latin American cultures in affirmation of divine motherhood loc: 12944

COUNTER-REFORMATION IN ASIA: EMPIRES UNCONQUERED loc: 12949

Whereas in Iberian America, Christianity could rely on official backing from colonial governments (subject to the myriad other concerns of colonial administrators), this was not so in Asia or Africa; nor did Europeans have disease on their side to weaken the great Asian empires they encountered, loc: 12950

Portuguese weakness meant that there was little or no military backing for Christianity, loc: 12954

outside these uncomfortable pockets of European rule, Catholicism in Asia had to make its way on its merits, loc: 12961

Only in the Philippine Islands, a Spanish colony named after King Philip II, did Christianity eventually secure a substantial foothold among a large population in Asia loc: 12962

missionary priest. Nearly always a Jesuit or a friar, he faced Asian peoples with age-old and subtle cultures, full of self-confidence and likely to be profoundly sceptical that Westerners could teach them anything of value. loc: 12968

Muslim rulers and Hindu elites in India could contemplate with sarcastic interest the normally dire relations between the Christian newcomers and the ancient Dyophysite ‘Mar Thoma’ Church in India which derived from Syria.…not impressive demonstrations of Christian brotherly love, loc: 12972

Hindu converts to Christianity automatically lost caste. loc: 12974

Francis Xavier…a new attitude emerged among the Jesuits, very different from Iberian missions in the Americas: other world faiths might have something of value and reflect God’s purpose, and it was worth making an effort to understand Indian culture, language and literature. loc: 12990

Robert de Nobili (1577-1656). He took the unprecedented step of living in southern India as if he were a high-caste Indian, adopting dress appropriate to an Indian holy man. loc: 12996

Chinese were not especially interested in large-scale contacts with foreign countries, not even for trade, and with their military might they were certainly not prepared to let the Portuguese in their small trading enclave at Macau adopt the ruthless proselytizing methods of Goa. loc: 13006

Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must adapt themselves to Chinese customs.…began dressing as Confucian scholars, loc: 13011

it was ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven, which every year produces conquistadors of souls’. loc: 13014

Chinese upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honoured place at the emperor’s court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge of reforming the imperial calendar - but not gaining many converts. loc: 13017

Portuguese suspicion of non-Portuguese clergy complicated the spread of Catholicism loc: 13032

When Dominicans and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, loc: 13032

traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family;…Complaints about the ‘Chinese rites’ were taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715. loc: 13037

significant setback for Western Christianity’s first major effort to understand and accommodate itself to another culture, loc: 13038

Jesuits continued to dominate the Japanese mission. They quickly achieved results: loc: 13043

aided by a determined and imaginative effort to meet Japan on its own terms. loc: 13044

envisaged the formation of a native clergy, loc: 13047

missionaries and merchants were lucky enough to arrive at a time when Japan was split between rival feudal lords. loc: 13053

Franciscan friars arrived in Japan to establish a missionary presence in 1593. loc: 13058

adopted an aggressively negative attitude towards Japanese culture, loc: 13060

Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously policed trading post.39 They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, loc: 13061

Church in Japan, despite the heroism of its native faithful, was reduced to a tiny and half-instructed remnant. loc: 13064

COUNTER-REFORMATION IN AFRICA: THE BLIGHT OF THE SLAVE TRADE loc: 13069

Christian mission in Africa was likewise based on Portuguese trading posts loc: 13070

climate and disease ecology proved lethal to most European missionary clergy, loc: 13072

disastrous flaw in European Christian mission in Africa, its association with the Portuguese slave trade. Millions were rounded up in the African interior by local rulers and shipped out through the Portuguese forts across the Atlantic to sustain the economy of American plantations; loc: 13077

from the late sixteenth century the Portuguese were (unwillingly) sharing this trade with the English and Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken to new plantations in Protestant colonies in North America.42 loc: 13080

Spaniards were not actively involved in the shipping trade, but their plantation colonies could not have survived without it. loc: 13082

the expedient of importing African slaves was in part meant to protect the native American population from exploitation. loc: 13084

pastoral work was bravely countercultural, arousing real disapproval among the settler population, but the Jesuits’ efforts to instil first a sense of sin (particularly sexual sin) and then repentance in their wretched penitents now seem oddly placed amid one of the greatest communal sins perpetrated by Western Christian culture.44 loc: 13093

The city of Loanda in what is now Angola was the main departure point for enslaved people from the south-west, and the clergy’s main role in the city became to baptize them before departure; loc: 13097

the native population despised Christianity. loc: 13101

in the Central African Atlantic kingdom of Kongo. Here the ruler Mvemba Nzinga became a fervent Christian…created a genuinely indigenous Church loc: 13107

the papacy continued to employ slaves in its Mediterranean galleys up to the French Revolution, loc: 13113

slave trade continued to subvert Central African society. loc: 13114

what Church life survived continued to depend on local catechists, loc: 13116

perpetuate what they knew of Christian belief and practice to their own people, albeit necessarily in a non-sacramental form. loc: 13118

future strength in African Christianity: independent Churches which would build what they wanted out of European Christian teaching loc: 13123

Just as with the Dyophysite Christians of India, the Society was much less prepared to make allowances for local custom in fellow Christians than it was for other world faiths loc: 13133

Jesuits violently criticized the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for what they saw as Judaizing deviations - celebration of the Sabbath, male circumcision and avoidance of pork. loc: 13136

Eventually the Ethiopians were infuriated into retaliation: brutal expulsion of the Jesuits, including some executions, followed in the 1630s, together with an emphatic reassertion (and perhaps a little invention) of authentic Ethiopian custom and theology. loc: 13137

West African religions dominated. So much of it was difficult to sustain, tied as it was to place and group identity, both now lost. So ancestor cults were replaced, and familiar deities given new honour by drawing on the Catholicism which surrounded the people imported to the colonial world. loc: 13147

Out of this subculture of Catholicism constructively melded in syncretist fashion with memories of other spiritualities came a variety of new religion with various identities: among much overlap were the Vodou (voodoo) of French Haiti, the Candomblé of Portuguese Brazil, the Santerı́a of Spanish Cuba. loc: 13151

The great advantage of the panoply of saints which the enslaved might encounter in their confraternities was that the saints could stand in for the hierarchy of divinities who in West Africa were offered devotion in the place of the supreme creator god Olurun (who was himself too powerful to be concerned with the affairs of feeble humans). loc: 13160

Below the creator god were also orishas, subordinate divinities in African religion connected with the whole range of human activities. Every person born might have a connection to an orisha, and it was also perfectly acceptable in Catholic practice for everyone to choose a personal patron saint; loc: 13162

The perpetual trouble everywhere was European reluctance to accept on equal terms the peoples whom they encountered,…loath to ordain native priests on a large scale or with equal authority to themselves. loc: 13186

that old problem of compulsory clerical celibacy gnawed away at the credibility of the Church. loc: 13189

when a Church infrastructure which remained overwhelmingly European fell into decay in any area of the world Christianity itself began to fade. loc: 13190

The final blow to nearly three centuries of Catholic world mission came in 1773 when the Catholic powers in concert forced the Pope to suppress the whole organization of the Society of Jesus; that was followed by the trauma of the French Revolution. loc: 13199

Topic: Chapter 20 Protestant Awakenings (1600-1800)

20 Protestant Awakenings (1600-1800) loc: 13201

PROTESTANTS AND AMERICAN COLONIZATION loc: 13203

New France, the basis of the future Quebec and Canada, became much more monochrome in its Catholic religion than the home country - loc: 13219

Both in Ireland and in America, the first English initiatives certainly employed Protestant rhetoric, presenting English colonists as fighting against miscellaneous forces of Antichrist, either papists or satanic non-Christian religions, but theirs was a rather political Protestantism. loc: 13226

After much loss of life and capital, an English settlement established a precarious but continuous existence from 1607, without Islamic help; it borrowed the name Virginia loc: 13234

Virginian settlers brought a clergyman with them and quickly made public provision for a parish ministry. So this was an official Church which identified itself with the established Church back home, loc: 13236

parishes were run by powerful ‘vestries’ of laypeople rather than clergymen. loc: 13243

Virginian Anglicanism was thus made safe for gentry who appreciated a decent and edifying but not overdramatic performance of the Prayer Book, loc: 13243

northern colonies saw the early Stuart Church of England as too flawed to be truly God’s Church. loc: 13246

Plymouth in what later became part of Massachusetts, was founded in 1620, by separatists who made no bones about their wish to isolate themselves completely from corrupt English loc: 13253

settlement remained small and poor, for not many wished to join the Pilgrims; loc: 13257

there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth’s existence; the sacrament of the Eucharist was not among their devotional priorities. loc: 13258

1630s…In that decade perhaps as many as twenty thousand emigrated to the New World loc: 13262

Some colonists established themselves far to the south in islands in the Caribbean, financed by Puritan grandees who saw these as useful bases for harassing the Spanish colonies, loc: 13264

1630 founded a new colony of Massachusetts, loc: 13266

This was a measure of their commitment to starting England afresh overseas. From the beginning, they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of the godly adult males who were the investors and colonists. loc: 13270

associates included a number of university-trained ministers ejected from or not prepared to serve in Laud’s Church, and as early as 1636 they founded a university college in Massachusetts to train up new clergy. Significantly, they placed the new college (soon named Harvard loc: 13276

rhetoric of this emigration sprang out of Puritan and Reformed themes which had sounded from English pulpits since the 1560s. loc: 13282

idea of covenant, first proclaimed in Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s Zürich (see pp. 620-21), was prominent. loc: 13282

communities set up in New England were prompt to covenant for their future.8 They were a chosen people, making a treaty with God and with each other. loc: 13287

Might they rather be re-entering an Edenic garden, as their home communities had once been, to tend and bring to order and peace? loc: 13291

begin cultivating and replicating these gardens of godly England which they had lost to the weeds and pollution of Charles I’s religion. loc: 13292

important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans. They wanted a truer form of the established Church, which somehow (perhaps uncomfortably and untidily, like Rogers’s Wethersfield) would also have the characteristics of a Church of the elect. loc: 13294

‘a city upon a hill’. This quotation from Matthew 5.14…He meant that like every other venture of the godly, and as in the quotation’s context in Matthew’s Gospel, Massachusetts was to be visible for all the world to learn from it. loc: 13298

those leaving Southampton should be conscious that the eyes of many in England, and perhaps as far away as Transylvania, were upon them.9 loc: 13300

Church of Massachusetts was therefore the paradox of an established Reformed Church with an all-embracing system of parishes like England, but run by local assemblies of the self-selected godly - a form of Church government which was ‘Congregational’, loc: 13302

never being short of ministers to serve its parishes, and that made establishing a single dominant Church all the easier. loc: 13305

laity who were devotees of the Religion of the Book, possibly the most literate society then existing in the world. loc: 13306

The elect were in charge of the Commonwealth; they were nevertheless still a minority of the population, loc: 13311

franchise for the colony’s assembly was limited to Church members. Still it was compulsory for everyone to go to their parish church loc: 13315

agreed on establishing a ‘Half-Way Covenant’. Some could remain members of the Church by virtue of their baptism only, but the fully committed would have to offer proof of repentance and lively faith to gain the full Church membership which allowed them to receive communion at the Lord’s Table. loc: 13322

arguments around the ‘Half-Way Covenant’ proved very disruptive loc: 13326

After royal intervention in the 1680s there was the extra annoyance of governors appointed by the Crown who were rarely sympathetic to the Congregationalist ministry, loc: 13327

indignity of an Anglican church built in the middle of Boston loc: 13328

Anne Hutchinson horrified the leadership by challenging the whole framework of Puritan piety established by covenant theology. loc: 13333

she criticized the way that Puritan theology constantly forced the elect to prove to themselves that they were growing in holiness. loc: 13335

holding her own devotional meetings and claiming special revelations of the Holy Spirit. loc: 13336

After two years’ tense confrontation, Hutchinson was banished, and travelled south to join a scattered set of coastal communities called Rhode Island.…set up by Roger Williams,…a haven for an intimidating variety of the discontented,…embrace complete religious toleration, loc: 13342

Calvinist that he still was, Williams believed that all the non-elect would go to Hell, but it was not his responsibility to make matters worse for them in this life. loc: 13343

Quakers arrived in 1657, determined to spread their ecstatic message of freedom and inner light, loc: 13347

Friends’ wilful separation from secular life aroused even greater fears loc: 13349

Quakers were publicly flogged and had their ears cropped; then, between 1659 and 1661, four were hanged for missionary activities loc: 13350

sharp reaction of protest both in New England and in the home country. loc: 13352

Rhode Island respected the Quaker commitment to pacifism by exempting them from military service. loc: 13355

John Eliot,…early English Protestant neglect of evangelizing among indigenous peoples loc: 13361

affected by their longing for the imminent arrival of the Last Days, because they both shared Oliver Cromwell’s biblically based belief that this event must be heralded by the conversion of the Jews (see pp. 773-4). Logically, therefore, that should happen first, and any conversion of new Gentile peoples would form a later stage of God’s plan.18 loc: 13374

their idleness when introduced to European farming suggested a connection to the failed farmer and first murderer Cain.19 loc: 13378

Eliot’s generous imagination to overcome such theological or psychological barriers. loc: 13380

His intensive work produced thousands of Indian converts, organized in ‘prayer towns’ next to English-cultivated territory, governed by the natives themselves, but imitating as far as possible English models of life. Few settlers displayed Eliot’s spirit of openness. As the colonies expanded in numbers and territorial ambitions through the century, such settlements were generally destroyed by warfare and colonial betrayal: loc: 13382

southern colonies and English islands in the Caribbean developed a plantation economy, particularly for tobacco and sugar (cotton came much later), they became deeply enmeshed in the system of importing African slaves loc: 13389

as the English on both sides of the Atlantic were talking in unprecedented ways about their own freedom and rights to choose, especially in religion, slaves were being shipped into the English colonies in hundreds, then thousands. Christianity did not seem to alter this for Protestants any more than it had for Catholics. loc: 13392

John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, resoundingly declared to Englishmen that ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man . . . that ’tis hardly to be conceived, loc: 13402

precisely what Locke himself had done when (as one of the first hereditary peers created in English North America) he helped first to draft and then to revise a constitution for a vast new English colony in the south called Carolina, loc: 13404

Slave numbers rocketed at the end of the seventeenth century: loc: 13407

liturgical innovation of one South Carolina Anglican clergyman, Francis Le Jau, who added to the baptism service a requirement that slaves being baptized should repeat an oath ‘that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live’. loc: 13408

Virginia in the south and New England in the north had created two contrasting forms of English-speaking colony. Both were firmly committed to their different patterns of established Churches, loc: 13413

Between the two regions, a variety of ‘Middle Colonies’ was set up, not all initially English. loc: 13416

Swedish Lutherans settled on the Delaware River, and the Protestant Dutch seized a spectacular natural harbour in the Hudson estuary loc: 13417

the aim of the Swedes and Dutch had been to reproduce the national Churches back home, but even before 1664 the religious cosmopolitanism of the northern Netherlands had already been reproduced in New Amsterdam, whether the Dutch Reformed Church liked it or not. That included pragmatic Dutch toleration of a wealthy Jewish community, loc: 13420

significant number of Jewish shareholders in the Dutch West India Company, loc: 13422

It was New York that first experienced the bewildering diversity of settlers which, during the eighteenth century, swelled into a flood, and made any effort to reproduce old Europe’s compartmentalized and discrete confessional Churches seem ludicrous. loc: 13424

1632 Roman Catholic aristocrats friendly with Charles I sponsored a colony in a region known as the Chesapeake north of Virginia, and named it Maryland after the King’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. loc: 13428

guaranteed complete toleration for all those who believed in Jesus Christ. loc: 13432

William Penn,…he renounced the use of coercion in religion, and granted free exercise of religion and political participation to all monotheists of whatever views taking shelter in his colony. He also tried to maintain friendly relations with Native Americans. loc: 13444

Pennsylvania came to have a rich mix loc: 13445

fostered a consistent hatred of slavery among Friends, loc: 13452

no one religious group could automatically claim exclusive status, unlike nearly all other colonies where a particular Church continued to claim official advantages loc: 13453

Anglicanism did manage to strengthen its position in the southern English American colonies after Charles II’s restoration (even in cosmopolitan New York), gaining established status in six out of the eventual thirteen. loc: 13456

origins of so many colonies in religious protest against the Church of England back home guaranteed that Anglicanism would never fully replicate its full English privileges in North America. loc: 13458

everywhere except Massachusetts, the colonies suffered a shortage of clergy loc: 13461

religious coercion discouraged settlement and was therefore economically bad for struggling colonial ventures. loc: 13463

THE FIGHT FOR PROTESTANT SURVIVAL (1660-1800) loc: 13468

long-drawn-out crisis for Protestants in late-seventeenth-century Europe. loc: 13471

Habsburgs began systematically dismantling a century and more of Protestant life in central Europe from Bohemia to Hungary, Catholic advance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued apace, and France re-emerged under Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715) as a major European power with an aggressively Catholic agenda. loc: 13472

Louis XIV…increased the size of that army fivefold…spurred on the Duke of Savoy in murderous campaigns against Savoy’s Protestant minority,…overturned his grandfather Henri IV’s religious settlement for France by revoking the Edict of Nantes - 150,000 Protestants are estimated to have fled France as a result, the largest displacement of Christians in early modern Europe.32 loc: 13480

Louis nearly succeeded where the Spanish monarchy had failed, in overwhelming the United Provinces of the Netherlands loc: 13483

the outrage of France’s invasion provoked Prince Willem of Orange, loc: 13485

As a by-blow in the course of his relentless campaigns against Louis, Willem gained the three thrones of Britain in 1688…provoked by the extraordinary stupidity of King James II, a sincere but inept convert to Roman Catholicism. loc: 13491

King Charles II had saved him between 1679 and 1681 from a real prospect of being excluded from the succession in favour of James’s daughters, Mary and Anne, loc: 13492

King’s strategy to save James from exclusion had been to strangle opposition from the ‘Whig’ group, which was promoting exclusion, through a royal alliance across the whole Atlantic archipelago with a rival political grouping within the Protestant establishment.…Tories were Protestants who championed government by bishops in the established Protestant Churches of the three kingdoms, and they trumpeted their belief in the divine right of kings as well as bishops, loc: 13498

When James’s antics in promoting the interests of his fellow Catholics made Tories snarl, he promptly abandoned the Tories and tried to outflank them, courting Protestant Dissenters by offering the same emancipation he was promoting for Catholics.34 loc: 13502

he now had a second wife, the Catholic Italian Mary of Modena. Their fatal mistake was to provide a half-brother for the Princesses Mary and Anne, James Francis:…boy was bound to be brought up a Catholic. loc: 13508

Mary’s husband, Stadhouder Willem, whose wife stood to lose her future thrones through this new arrival. loc: 13508

Willem to launch naval and military intervention against his father-in-law, who fled the country in a state of nervous collapse, and the throne was declared vacant. loc: 13510

Convention contrived an ingenious if unorthodox replacement for its missing monarch by recognizing a team, William (III) and Mary (II) loc: 13517

episcopally structured Church of England, which did represent the overwhelming majority of English people, grudgingly agreed henceforth to tolerate Protestant Dissenting groups, loc: 13521

Presbyterian activists were sweeping away episcopal government in the Church of Scotland, loc: 13523

Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland confirmed in privilege and power, despite its ludicrously small proportion of adherents among a sea of Irish Catholics. loc: 13524

Tory High Churchpeople agonized about this untidy solution. Some left the Church of England, insistent that their duty to God meant that they could not break their oath to King James, however obnoxious he had proved. Among these ‘Non-Jurors’ was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, loc: 13526

not surprising that the leadership of the Church now shifted to those whom their more partisan colleagues had already angrily christened ‘Latitudinarians’ (see p. 654): those willing to allow a wide latitude of religious belief loc: 13531

triumphant Whigs also needed to justify the change of regime which now brought them to power loc: 13533

The most clear-sighted Whig spokesman, although not at the time the most popular precisely because of his clear-sightedness, was John Locke. loc: 13534

He appealed to the Bible to demolish the idea that it provided a case for the divine right of kings. loc: 13537

Although Adam’s fall had brought about the punishment that humans would have to labour in order to survive, this burden had engendered a natural right in all people to labour and to possess the land for labour. This preceded any authority to govern, which resulted from contracts freely made by humans in order to live more easily with each other. loc: 13540

Locke’s language of rights and contract fermented in the political arguments of the anglophone world and then spread into Europe generally, decisively undermining the concept of sacred monarchy. loc: 13546

English-led armies continued to fight the French under his British successor and sister-in-law, Queen Anne, decisively blocking Louis’s seemingly inexorable advance. loc: 13548

John Churchill’s victory at Blenheim in 1704,…brilliant command of the armies had, in four major battles, permanently halted the Catholic tide from washing away all surviving Protestant power. loc: 13552

thrones of Ireland and Great Britain (from 1707 there had been a United Kingdom of England and Scotland) went to another descendant of the Elector Palatine Friedrich, the Elector Georg of Hanover. Now he was King George I of Great Britain loc: 13557

From 1688 to 1702, and again from 1714 until 1832, when different laws of succession severed the thrones of Britain and Hanover, the British Isles were part of a joint European and vigorously Protestant state enterprise spanning the North Sea, while the British also built up a seaborne empire, first in North America and then in India. loc: 13563

British interests in Asia, to begin with in fierce competition with their Protestant co-religionists the Dutch, were not to acquire territory but, like the Portuguese before them, to create small bases which would stabilize their trade loc: 13565

In the British Isles, the pace of manufacturing quickened until, with the aid of a new technology harnessing the power of steam for production, Britain developed Europe’s first industrial revolution, loc: 13569

Its self-image was based on a narrative of heroic struggle against popery and arbitrary tyranny (represented generally by the French), in which Protestant English and Protestant Scots had buried their differences in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, creating a common new home for their two peoples: Great Britain. loc: 13573

British adventures across the world became, for the next century and more, an overwhelmingly Protestant story.38 loc: 13576

Mughal Empire in India, which had seemed so formidable to Catholic European powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was beginning to fail.…everywhere, Spanish and Portuguese power was looking far more vulnerable. In the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France contended for supremacy: a ‘Seven Years War’ drew in all the major European powers, the first war to be fought in continents circling the globe. loc: 13580

When the British fought the French to a standstill and concluded a peace treaty in Paris in 1763, they found themselves in charge of a land empire which needed defending across the world, and their armies were now carried by a navy with a near-universal range. loc: 13585

PIETISM AND THE MORAVIANS loc: 13591

King George I came to England in 1714 from a Lutheran northern Europe very conscious of its own providential survival in the Thirty Years War, yet still not at ease. loc: 13595

Battered by the armies of Louis XIV, it then suffered several further decades of calamities from the 1690s: a run of terrible weather producing famine, which nurtured epidemics, and from 1700 the Great Northern War, which, over twenty years, broke Swedish aspirations to great-power status in the Baltic and consolidated the imperial power of Peter the Great’s Russia loc: 13596

heavy pastoral burden on Lutheran clergy loc: 13599

With the religious houses and gilds there had disappeared a host of Christian ministries and activities, from charitable work to itinerant preaching to contemplation, which the Reformation had done its best to replace, but with incomplete success. loc: 13604

renewal of German and Scandinavian Protestantism, which has come to be known as Pietism. loc: 13606

Pietism was intimately bound up with education. loc: 13616

Crucial to Pietist formation were two Lutheran pastors, Philipp Jakob Spener and his younger contemporary August Hermann Francke. loc: 13624

solution was to seek out the most energetic and serious layfolk in the parishes and treat them as partners in ministry, gathering people outside service-time to meet for Bible-reading, prayer and hymn-singing loc: 13627

Friedrich of Brandenburg founded a new university for his territories in the city of Halle, which was to prove a major source for disseminating a new spirit in Lutheranism. loc: 13629

Pietism, with its varied Protestant roots and openness to crossing the Lutheran-Reformed divide, was always going to get a sympathetic hearing from the monarchs of the house of Hohenzollern, loc: 13632

From 1695, Francke created at Halle an extraordinary complex of orphanage, medical clinic, schools for both poor children and young noblemen and a teacher-training college, complete with printing press, library and even a museum to demonstrate to the pupils the wonders of God’s creation. loc: 13634

Franke’s principle was that everyone, whatever their position in life, should come out of childhood education able to read the Bible and to take pride in at least one special skill. loc: 13639

link the profession of Christianity to personal self-confidence and practical achievement, loc: 13640

Halle set patterns in the Protestant world for institutions created by private initiative, loc: 13642

laid out the whole first thirty years of his life in terms of progressive and not instantaneous conversion: a continuous spiritual struggle marked by dramatic high points. loc: 13646

Countless Evangelicals thereafter tried to shape their lives in the same way, loc: 13648

preparation for the End Times, which would be heralded by the conversion of the Jews. loc: 13649

decades of excited speculation about the return of the Messiah which had agitated contemporary Judaism, loc: 13650

a new burst of hymnody. Here was the solvent of the tensions within the movement caused by its challenge to Lutheran tradition and its adventurous reaching out to the Reformed; loc: 13656

preference for informality and the extrovert expression of emotion in worship contributed to a gradual abandoning of the continuing use of Latin loc: 13681

jettisoning of much traditional ceremony in German and Scandinavian Lutheran worship. loc: 13682

the Moravian Church, a radical restructuring of some of the last remnants from the pre-Reformation movement of dissent in the kingdom of Bohemia, the Unitas Fratrum loc: 13705

given shelter to the north of the Habsburg frontiers by a Lutheran nobleman,…Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf…a place for craftwork and farming, the first of a network of communities loc: 13709

Most were Pietists who had found their own religious environments increasingly difficult and had now made the momentous choice to start a new life, uprooting themselves from a familiar homeland. loc: 13716

a new congregation as highly structured and centred round worship as the most rigorous monastic order, while it also moulded the whole family lives loc: 13721

worshipped as frequently as monks - seven times a day on weekdays, longer on Sundays - and their worship was full of song: loc: 13722

Zinzendorf set aside all previous Christian doctrinal requirements, with the sole exception of his own Lutheran inheritance, the Augsburg Confession of 1530. What he added was an idiosyncratic and intense communal piety,…language of mystical marriage…obsession with Christ’s blood and wounds loc: 13733

one of the most significant characteristics of this ebullient yet tightly structured movement was its hunger to undertake missions overseas to non-Christians. loc: 13747

the first Protestant Church to commit itself to the task with such consistency, loc: 13749

Moravians showed other Protestant Churches that missions could be successful and that the initiative was worth imitating. loc: 13770

THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL: METHODISM loc: 13772

England’s prosperity and increasingly secular preoccupations (see pp. 787-91) were matched by a failure of its ecclesiastical courts, loc: 13776

never regained their authority when the restored episcopal establishment failed to include all English Protestants after 1662. loc: 13779

English Parliament passed in 1697-8 an ‘Act for the effectual suppressing of blasphemy and profaneness’, by which it principally meant systematic anti-Trinitarian belief. The Act was an admission by the legislators that it was now possible to see ‘Socinianism’ as a serious threat to the Church, and that the Church was not capable of taking its own action against the threat. loc: 13781

One first reaction to the new situation in England was the channelling of Christian activism into voluntary societies.…voluntary organizations with specific practical focuses on obvious needs, loc: 13790

They involved a not altogether stable coalition of all those who mourned the collapse of social discipline, and who together sought to recruit paid informers to search out varieties of human sin for public prosecution. loc: 13793

By the 1730s the work of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners had collapsed, aided loc: 13796

the Evangelical Revival was an answer to this failure; loc: 13798

Evangelicals sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship loc: 13799

impulse in part found a home in the Church of England, but it also revitalized existing English Dissenting denominations from the mid-seventeenth century, and it produced a new religious body which by accident rather than design found itself outside the established Church: Methodism. loc: 13801

John Wesley,…On John Wesley’s return from Georgia, his self-confidence severely damaged, he was much comforted by Moravians, loc: 13818

listening to a reading from Martin Luther’s restatement of Paul’s message to the Romans - justification by faith alone. In a phrase now famous, he felt his ‘heart strangely warmed’ loc: 13821

conviction that he must not simply seek personal holiness but spread a message of salvation as far as he could, loc: 13825

great shift in population to new manufacturing centres loc: 13829

How could the new populations receive the pastoral care they deserved…preaching in the open air, loc: 13833

Crowds unused to such direct personal address or much consideration from educated clergymen were gripped by mass emotion and a sense of their own sin and its release. loc: 13834

Wesley relished organizing people. He sent out travelling (‘itinerant’) preachers to build up societies from among the excited crowds, who found peace and personal dignity in the Christian message, loc: 13836

characteristic Evangelical emphasis on Jesus’s direct address to the individual, the Saviour’s gaze turned lovingly on the poorest wretch.62 loc: 13840

their music became one of the distinguishing marks of the culture of the ‘chapel’, an all-embracing society which was a safe and wholesome setting for ordered family life. loc: 13845

Methodist hymns were an element in the gradual separation of Wesley’s movement from the Church of England. The irregular and noisy activity of the Methodists deeply worried the Church authorities and infuriated many parish clergy. loc: 13854

The only legal way in either England or Scotland to sustain his preaching houses was to declare them to be Dissenting chapels and get them registered as the law demanded; loc: 13861

when revolution broke out in 1776, they were seriously affected. Many Anglican clergy withdrew and there was virtually no one left to whom Wesley’s American followers could go to receive Holy Communion. loc: 13864

There was still no Anglican bishop in America to ordain new clergy and Wesley could not persuade any English bishop to do so. loc: 13867

in the early history of the Church in Alexandria, where priests as well as bishops had been involved in ordinations. So, on the basis of being a ‘Presbyter of the Church of England’, he took it on himself to revive the practice. loc: 13868

even towards the end of his life he repeated (as did Charles, with rather less complication) that he lived and died a member of the Church of England.65 loc: 13873

Wesley’s deliberate avoidance of the full consequences of his actions meant that he left a host of problems for his preachers and societies.…resulting quarrels were often bitter, loc: 13879

Methodists still all sang Charles Wesley’s hymns and shared a common ethos, practising a ‘religion of the heart’ which treasured Wesley’s optimistic affirmation of the possibility of Christian perfection. loc: 13881

While John Wesley loved Luther’s exposition of Christ’s sacrifice for sin in his Passion and the need for the gift of free grace for salvation, his High Churchmanship led him to reject predestination and to affirm humanity’s universal potential for acceptance by God. He wanted to challenge his converts to do their best in an active Christian life, loc: 13883

he commended the challenge to Reformed views of salvation offered by the sixteenth-century renegade Dutch Reformed minister Jacobus Arminius loc: 13886

Many Evangelical clergy nevertheless managed to avoid the separation from the Church of England loc: 13893

Through their energies, certain areas and parishes became strongholds of Evangelical practice. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, there was a recognizable Evangelical party among English clergy and gentry loc: 13895

a long process of remoulding British social attitudes away from the extrovert consumerism of the eighteenth century, in an effort to make people exercise a self-discipline in their daily lives which would police itself, in the absence of any possibility of the national Church now doing so. loc: 13898

Congregations were encouraged to better themselves materially as well as spiritually, loc: 13900

Hard work was allied with strict morality; if ever there was anything resembling the ‘Protestant work ethic’, it came out of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival rather than the sixteenth-century Reformation.67 loc: 13909

set patterns for the moral seriousness which was the preferred public self-image of most nineteenth-century Britons.68 loc: 13913

they did much to influence the behaviour of two great international institutions created by a century of warfare and imperial expansion, the British army and navy. loc: 13915

THE GREAT AWAKENINGS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION loc: 13924

‘Great Awakenings’. These emerged at a time when the leaderships of many American Churches were feeling that the dreams of the first colonists had been betrayed; loc: 13926

systems of Church discipline, once so important in New England’s sense of its identity, were now impossible to enforce. loc: 13928

Before Wesley’s movement reached across the Atlantic, the Awakenings in the northern colonies were more purely Reformed, associated with Churches which sprang from Scottish or Dutch roots rather than from those of English origin. loc: 13934

Scots had begun emigrating from their kingdom in the early seventeenth century,…counter Catholic militancy, sending them to the most troublesome part of Gaelic Ireland, Ulster.…had every incentive to discover their Protestantism in the face of a resentful Catholic population whom they were seeking to supplant. loc: 13939

massive open-air occasional celebrations of the Eucharist, preceded by long periods of catechism and sermonizing.…So large were the gatherings that often no church building could hold them and they turned into open-air ‘Holy Fairs’, occasions of mass celebration and socializing within a framework of emotional worship: a shared experience of ecstatic renewal, or ‘revival’.71 loc: 13943

emphasize the distinctiveness of Scottish religion in the face of Stuart attempts to conform it to English practice, and Britain’s conflicts in the seventeenth century crystallized the movement’s identification with the Presbyterians who seized power in Scotland in 1691 loc: 13946

immigrants from Ulster and Scotland set up their own Presbyterian Churches, and the ‘Holy Fairs’ proved no less appropriate to the American frontier…‘Scotch-Irish’…came into increasing conflict with the older English established Churches. loc: 13956

Theodorus Frelinghuysen,…spiritually formed by Pietism.…he helped to create a lasting pattern: an appeal to the need for personal conversion and ‘revival’ in the Church, and a tension between those who advocated revival and those who did not find this a useful or appropriate way of expressing their Christian commitment. loc: 13961

During the 1730s a similar excitement (and similar backlash) appeared in the anglophone Presbyterian Churches, led by a family of ministers who classically were Scots immigrants from Ulster, William Tennent and his sons Gilbert and William. loc: 13962

In the northern colonies, Awakenings were led in the Congregational Church by Jonathan Edwards.…interest in philosophy with an uncompromising attachment to Calvinism, reinforced by an experience of conversion in 1727. He insisted that we must worship God with the whole person, mind and emotion, and from the greatest philosopher to the smallest child we must love God in simplicity. loc: 13976

champion of the composition of new hymns over the traditional Puritan singing of metrical psalms, loc: 13983

new religious movement which had little actually new in its beliefs (Edwards prided himself in his traditional Reformed theology) took a novel face through its use of music.74 loc: 13984

Edwards’s people in Northampton, Massachusetts, experienced the exhilaration and disruption of revival,…emotional havoc caused in congregations in the wake of Whitefield’s visits, and he agonized about how far to restrict the communion table to the demonstrably regenerate, loc: 13991

his great intellectual reputation lent respectability to a seductive conception of the Last Days, known in the jargon of theologians as ‘postmillennialism’.…human history would culminate in a thousand-year rule of the saints. Edwards believed that this millennium would take place before the Second Coming of Christ - hence the Second Coming would be ‘post-millennial’.…suggesting that America might be the place where the golden age of the millennium was scheduled to begin, in untamed wildernesses unsullied by ancient European sins. loc: 14000

The Great Awakenings thus shaped the future of American religion. They destroyed the territorial communality which was still the assumption of most religious practice back in Europe. Religious practice, like conversion, became a matter of choice. loc: 14004

Priorities in worship changed in the Awakenings. Renewal was experienced as renewal of enthusiasm rather than performance of an unchanging liturgy; Protestant Churches which did not adapt, and which based themselves on traditional European models, suffered. loc: 14009

Coalescing out of the welter of new gatherings came new denominations. In the south, a Church called the Separate Baptists was virtually created by the Awakenings, and the Methodists, loc: 14014

Awakenings enjoyed huge success among enslaved people. loc: 14018

Evangelical demand for a personal choice: that gave dignity to people who had never been offered a choice in their lives, loc: 14025

Related was Methodism’s insistence on complete personal transformation or regeneration, an attractive theme in lives which offered little other hope of dramatic change. loc: 14027

Protestant American enslaved people had texts which gave them stories and songs. loc: 14031

By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people - and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists. loc: 14043

Revolution which had talked much of life, liberty and human happiness, African-Americans whether free or bonded found little welcome in white Churches and at best would be directed to a segregated seat. So they frequently made a further choice - to create their own Churches loc: 14044

Congregations demanded their share in Christian decency - loc: 14048

So a racial revolution, shaped by Evangelical Christianity, took shape quietly alongside a different revolutionary uprising by whites against whites. loc: 14055

Scotch-Irish clergy, with their own traditions of warfare against Westminster, were influential in articulating opposition to British misgovernment; loc: 14070

Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England’s compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. loc: 14073

Methodists, taking their cue from John Wesley’s emphatic Tory loyalism, opposed the Revolution; so, unsurprisingly, did many Anglicans. loc: 14078

Nevertheless, because the revolutionary leadership sprang from the social establishment in several colonies, it included many who were Anglicans by denominational loyalty, no less than two-thirds of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.88 Elite education tended to lead these Founding Fathers not to the Awakenings but to the Enlightenment and Deism loc: 14082

What this revolutionary elite achieved amid a sea of competing Christianities, many of which were highly uncongenial to them, was to make religion a private affair in the eyes of the new American federal government. loc: 14096

one by one, those state Church establishments were dismantled; loc: 14105

Since Winthrop’s would-be monolithic Congregational Church establishment has also long gone, American Protestantism in its exuberant variety has adroitly grafted on to its memories of Massachusetts the obstinate individualism and separatism of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers - an ethos which Winthrop and his covenanting congregations deplored. All of this is served up with a powerful dose of extrovert revivalist fervour ultimately deriving from the Scottish Reformation. loc: 14112

Because Protestant anglophone culture has until the present century remained hegemonic in the USA, the American varieties of British Protestantism are the most characteristic forms of Protestant Christianity today - together with their offshoots, the most dynamic forms of Christianity worldwide. loc: 14116

Topic: Chapter 21 Enlightenment: Ally or Enemy? (1492-1815)

21 Enlightenment: Ally or Enemy? (1492-1815) loc: 14129

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL PHILOSOPHY (1492-1700) loc: 14131

Masonic practice actually began in late-sixteenth-century Scotland as an outcrop of Reformed Christianity. loc: 14182

From the 1590s, various Scottish notables in contact with Schaw joined the trade ‘lodges’ of masons and builders, which clearly replaced in their esteem the devotional gilds which the Scottish Reformers had destroyed only a few decades before. loc: 14186

The impressive ancient history manufactured by Scottish Freemasons gradually travelled throughout Europe and eventually beyond, as Masonic lodges spread as congenial settings for male camaraderie with a habit of secrecy calculated to put them beyond the reach of the Church authorities. loc: 14191

general hostility to the institution of the Catholic Church. loc: 14194

a heady mixture of Paracelsianism, hermeticism and Cabbala bred an optimism in Protestant Europe loc: 14196

The discipline which is the ancestor of modern specializations like astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry was then called natural philosophy. It demarcated itself from theology’s concentration on the world beyond by exploring evidence from nature, the visible created world. loc: 14200

Evidence from the created world might have its own mysterious or magical dimension when seen through the eyes of a Paracelsian or Neoplatonist, and so it might link directly with religious and even political concerns. loc: 14207

Protestant hopes for a coming apocalypse, disappointed in Friedrich’s downfall, persisted. loc: 14214

possibilities offered by the apocalypse were constructively developed by two of Europe’s most restlessly creative Protestant scholars, loc: 14217

Johannes Comenius…John Dury.…They saw in England’s Republic in the 1650s a new flowering of scholarship and radical extension of human knowledge in the many different fields of natural philosophy. Both men believed that Classical esoteric literature was not a series of ancient dead ends, but an entry into knowledge long forgotten. loc: 14218

Their enthusiasms included the readmission of the Jews to England after their expulsion back in 1290: this would hasten the Last Days, provided of course the Jews dutifully converted. loc: 14222

foundation with Charles’s patronage of England’s premier forum for a continuing gentlemanly discussion of natural philosophy. This ‘Royal Society’ was a regrouping of several of the most prominent speculative thinkers who had flourished under the Interregnum regime. loc: 14230

blend of fascination with a mysterious past, innovative observation and abstract thinking; loc: 14232

Newton’s task was to recover a lost rationality: ‘the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. loc: 14235

there is no way [‘without revelation’, he inserted in his manuscript in an afterthought] to come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature.’9 loc: 14236

Francis Bacon,…a ‘Foundation’ of philosophers devoted to improving human society through practical (‘empirical’) experiment and observation - loc: 14240

he presented what he was doing as the ‘instauration’ of humankind’s dominion over creation lost in Adam’s fall: a restoration of the image of God in humanity.10 loc: 14243

observation had long revealed tensions with theology. One was medicine, where for centuries doctors had been inclined to see the evidence of their eyes as more important than what the textbooks told them. That shocked theologians, who were inclined to take very seriously what the great Classical authorities Aristotle or Galen said about the human body, loc: 14255

Melanchthon and John Calvin flatly disagreed about the value of astrology, which meant that sixteenth-century Lutheran ministers lined up on confessional grounds behind Melanchthon against Calvin, and proclaimed astrology as a respectable and valuable guide to God’s purposes. loc: 14264

natural philosophy had more room to manoeuvre amid the complexities and divisions of the Protestant world. loc: 14272

alliance of natural philosophy with the wisdom of an esoteric past was gradually abandoned, calling into question mainstream Christian authority. loc: 14275

JUDAISM, SCEPTICISM AND DEISM (1492-1700) loc: 14277

Doubt is fundamental to religion. loc: 14277

a distinctive feature of modern Western culture, and through it any Christianity exposed to the spread of Western culture, has come to be an inclination to doubt any proposition from the religious past, and to reject the assumption that there is a special privilege for one sort of religious truth. loc: 14282

a cosmopolitan crypto-Jewish community developed, adopting Portuguese customs and language while travelling, and settling in western Europe wherever it seemed safe. loc: 14289

Sephardic Jews prospered, usually through trade, but also through practising that usefully marginal profession medicine and sometimes teaching in the less rigidly exclusive or more unwary universities and colleges loc: 14291

where the danger was least.…Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, traditionally multicultural…Prague proved a cultural melting pot for various strands of European Jewry…As Amsterdam rose to commercial greatness after the War of Independence from the Spaniards, it became a major haven for Judaism, loc: 14304

challenges to Christian orthodoxy, and now they met new forces of doubt among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam.18 loc: 14321

Specific examples of doubt are generally hidden from us throughout the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, since it was suicidal for anyone to proclaim doubt or unbelief, loc: 14325

The best way (as with sodomy) was to shelter behind interest in Classical literature. loc: 14328

gradually in the seventeenth century doubts melded into that systematic and self-confident confrontation with religious tradition which has become part of Western culture loc: 14332

Inquisitions, which demanded a profound and complete conversion from people, many of whom held a deep faith already. Among many possible outcomes of this shattering experience, one effect for some was to breed scepticism about all religious patterns.20 loc: 14334

Dutch,…weary of all strident forms of religion by the end of the sixteenth century, loc: 14339

followers of Jacobus Arminius, expelled from the Church and further victimized as a result of the major Church synod at Dordt (Dordrecht) in 1618-19. loc: 14341

although it produced a firm and lasting shape to Reformed orthodoxy, it did as much to alienate dissenters and force them to make decisions about their religious future outside the mainstream. loc: 14344

‘Collegiants’, produced their own brand of rational religion which dispensed with any need for clergy.22 loc: 14345

At the centre of this fusion of ideas was Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza.…Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670),…demanded that the Bible be treated as critically as any other text, loc: 14358

sacred texts are human artefacts, venerable religious institutions ‘relics of man’s ancient bondage’. loc: 14359

Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) saw God as undifferentiated from the force of nature or the state of the universe. Naturally such a God is neither good nor evil, but simply and universally God, unconstrained by any moral system which human beings might recognize or create. loc: 14364

Spinoza’s proposition that ‘the human mind, insofar as it perceives things truly, is part of the infinite intellect of God, and thus it is as inevitable that the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are true as that God’s ideas are true’.26 loc: 14368

pervading his carefully worded writings there is a clear notion of a divine spirit inhabiting the world, and a profound sense of wonder and reverence for mystery. loc: 14370

Pierre Bayle,…Bayle tartly observed that morality in Christian societies seemed as prone to fashion and local custom as in those of any other faith. This was a radical attack on any assumption that Christian ethics were necessarily a product of Christian doctrine. loc: 14381

Hobbes denied that it was possible for a God to exist without material substance, delicately ridiculed the Trinity out of existence loc: 14388

Since Quakers drew divine authority from the light of the Spirit within them, they were inclined to demonstrate this by denigrating the authority of the Bible. loc: 14393

Quakers noted scholars’ increasing rediscovery of manuscripts containing inter-testamental literature or Christian apocrypha, much of which looked remarkably like the Bible. loc: 14396

Isaac La Peyrère,…threw the Creation story into the melting pot by arguing that there had been races of humans earlier than Adam and Eve, who were the ancestors of the Jews only. loc: 14409

wiped out the Western Christian doctrine of original sin: loc: 14411

If there were other worlds, not merely original sin seemed a dubious doctrine; how could the Church proclaim the uniqueness of biblical revelation?31 loc: 14415

Treatise of the three impostors…condemnation of all three Semitic faiths, it proclaimed that ‘there are no such things in Nature as either God or Devil or Soul or Heaven or Hell . . . [T]heologians . . . are all of them except for some few ignorant dunces . . . people of villainous principles, who maliciously abuse and impose on the credulous populace’.32 loc: 14420

Huguenots had been among the first to make a consistent return to Erasmus’s project of historical criticism of the biblical text, loc: 14428

the systematic application of critical principles to textual scholarship in general was actually a product of the Counter-Reformation loc: 14435

French Benedictine monasteries dedicated to St Maur loc: 14437

requirement to scrutinize historical texts without sentiment or regard for their sacred character. All texts were there as part of the range of historical evidence, loc: 14439

Protestants were nevertheless more seriously affected than Catholics, because of their general rejection of allegory in interpreting the Bible unless absolutely necessary (see pp. 596-7). They were left with the literal sense of the biblical text, loc: 14445

growing feeling among some Western Christians that not merely other Christianities or even Judaism, but other world religions, might provide insight into truth loc: 14450

reliable translation (1647) of the Qur’an into French, loc: 14456

Isaac Newton was among those who concluded from these various stirrings that all the world’s cultures sprang from a single civilization informed by knowledge of the divine, but scattered in Noah’s Flood.36 loc: 14462

concept of a God who had certainly created the world and set up its laws in structures understandable by human reason, but who after that allowed it to go its own way, precisely because reason was one of his chief gifts to humanity, and order a gift to his creation. This was the approach to divinity known as deism. loc: 14467

Ranged against the rationalists or deists were the anxious voices of other members of the same intellectual elite, who were promoting the view of an intensely personal, interventionist God in the various Protestant Evangelical Awakenings, loc: 14485

SOCIAL WATERSHEDS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND ENGLAND (1650-1750) loc: 14489

the Netherlands and England.…pioneered the future in another and very different respect: towards the end of the seventeenth century, both societies began a long process of moving Christian doctrine and practice from the central place in European everyday life which it had enjoyed for more than a millennium, and placing it among a range of personal choices. loc: 14493

often reluctant embrace of religious toleration for a wide variety of religious dissidence, loc: 14497

wider distribution of prosperity than any other part of seventeenth-century Europe. loc: 14497

first regions to escape famine, loc: 14499

Ordinary people in these late-seventeenth-century societies revelled in the unfamiliar sensation of possessing more and more objects which they did not strictly need, and just as much, they enjoyed access to a degree of leisure, loc: 14504

public Christian devotional music was being turned into a personal leisure activity. loc: 14510

Dutch developed the concept of the organ recital: a use of church buildings without specific devotional reference loc: 14512

By 1700 in Protestant Europe oratorio performances were moving out of churches into secular public buildings, and sometimes acquiring secular subjects to match; loc: 14520

worship to leisure, and it began a process by which the performance of or experience of music became for many Europeans the basis of an alternative spirituality loc: 14528

clergy’s sermons on state occasions…less construction of the nation as chosen like the kingdom of Israel, following God’s judgement and fearing the collective sin of its people: instead, much more celebration of the nation’s honour, its ability to generate prosperity and liberty and therefore personal happiness. These were still rewards from God for society’s good behaviour, but the reward was seen more as a matter of logical consequence than of direct divine intervention. loc: 14534

These new emphases reflected the influence of deism, that view of God which envisaged a separation between creator God and creation.41 loc: 14539

Western discourse on philosophy came to be dominated by a philosopher whose assumptions likewise radically detached the spiritual from the material. loc: 14542

Descartes…Cartesian dualism, combined with Thomas Hobbes’s relentless materialism and Isaac Newton’s demonstration of the mechanical operation of the universe, has tended to resolve the difficulty by privileging the material over the spiritual - after all, material substance seems a good deal easier to encounter, register or measure than spirit. loc: 14552

GENDER ROLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT loc: 14558

David Hume,…‘a commerce with strangers ... rouses men from their indolence; and . . . raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed’.44 loc: 14561

leisure stimulates the imagination and provides the chance to make very profound choices: to reflect on personal identity beyond prescriptions laid down by others. loc: 14563

Gender roles became more rigidly divided.…where once women had been regarded as uncontrollable and lustful like fallen Eve, now they were increasingly regarded as naturally frail and passive, in need of male protection.45 loc: 14567

Most surprising of all was a new phenomenon in both Amsterdam and London: from the 1690s, both hosted a male homosexual public subculture, loc: 14568

the new visibility of gay men which provoked periodic purges and moral panics in both cities loc: 14571

Christianity was becoming an activity in which more women than men participated. loc: 14576

when the coercive structures of the established Church collapsed, membership lists of the growing number of voluntary churches - Independents, Baptists, Quakers and the like - often reveal women outnumbering men by two to one.48 loc: 14583

English clergyman and ethical writer Richard Allestree and the leading Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather agreed in finding women more spiritual than men, loc: 14598

Mary Astell was a celibate High Church Anglican Tory with a lively interest in contemporary philosophy, and her Toryism made her a clear-eyed critic of the limitations of Whig proponents of a renewed Christianity like John Locke, who seemed to talk much of freedom for men, but not for half the human race loc: 14608

ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY loc: 14619

The Enlightenment bred an open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths in specially privileged writings exempt from detached analysis, loc: 14624

in its optimism, commitment to progress and steadily more material, secularizing character, it represented a revulsion against Augustine of Hippo’s proclamation of original sin. loc: 14625

It is possible to read the Protestant awakenings as a shocked reaction to the social and intellectual innovations of the early Enlightenment. loc: 14630

Key figures of the Evangelical awakenings respected the impulse to rationality which informed Enlightenment thought, and were fascinated by the intellectual ferment and the extensions of knowledge around them. loc: 14632

In some measure, in its attempts to improve the human condition, the Enlightenment was a project for the reconstruction of the Christian religion, and it was in dialogue with the other projects for human improvement contained in Evangelicalism. loc: 14642

David Hume, whose consideration of morality led him to the conclusion that it was entirely based on human feeling or ‘moral sentiment’, and that human experience could not move beyond knowledge of itself to provide real answers to such problems as the creation of all things. He therefore found revealed religion incredible in a literal sense, and, as Bayle had done before him, he radically separated morality from the practice of organized religion. loc: 14644

By the mid-eighteenth century the Jesuits were running the largest single directed system of education that the world had ever known, an intellectual network unique at the time in its cultivation of scientific and cultural investigations, and inevitably their research culture formed an important component of the Enlightenment. loc: 14655

A new Augustinianism surfaced in the University of Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands, in particular in the thought of Cornelius Jansen loc: 14680

disputes about Jansenism turned into a struggle for the soul of the French Church, now vigorously resurgent against a steadily more beleaguered Reformed Protestantism. loc: 14690

Was Catholicism to be directed by the wisdom of the pope in Rome, or was its theology to be constructed from the creative arguments of the wider Church, such as theologians in the Sorbonne? Where did authority lie to make decisions in such controversies, with a papal monarch, or with a collegiate decision by the bishops of the Church? loc: 14695

Louis XIV, influenced by his devout mistress Madame de Maintenon, eventually sided with the papalists against the Jansenists. loc: 14698

persecution of the Port-Royal community, which culminated in an official order for the destruction and deliberate profanation of its chief house in 1710; loc: 14699

disastrous legacy to the French Church, because the Jansenists would not go away. loc: 14701

Around Jansenism gathered all sorts of dissident strains in both Church and State. When the Society of Jesus came under attack, it was not unbelievers of the Enlightenment but a surviving network of Jansenists who contrived its destruction in France, loc: 14706

French Church was an unstable mixture of triumphalism and disarray. It aspired to a stricter Counter-Reformation control of society than any other part of the Catholic Church in Europe, fitfully backed by coercion from the monarchy loc: 14715

It was not surprising that when reaction came, it was in the name of a wider freedom of life. loc: 14721

soon scepticism or hatred of the Church moved on to become what we would define as atheism. loc: 14723

If the philosophy of Locke and the mechanical universe of Newton had banished mystery from human affairs, Voltaire saw Catholicism as a self-interested conspirator to perpetuate that mystery.63 loc: 14735

he spoke out against injustices perpetrated by French Catholic authorities against Huguenots and those accused of blasphemy, but it was the Church’s capacity to interfere with the minds of the intelligent that he chiefly detested; loc: 14739

The effect of his attacks on organized religion was to deny any meaningful place to God in human affairs. loc: 14748

Denis Diderot,…atheism was much more thoroughgoing loc: 14751

Diderot’s view of knowledge was severely material: the world was a collection of molecules, and knowledge was that available to the senses, which might structure morality loc: 14752

The overall tone of the Encyclopédie was deist, and despite official French censorship the assumptions behind it were those of natural religion; loc: 14758

Rousseau tried to remedy this by devising a ‘natural’ religion, based on the Christian Gospels, that sought to avoid what he saw as the unhealthy dogmatism disfiguring traditional Christian belief. loc: 14767

Rousseau’s doctrine of a ‘General Will’, the consent of the generality of society, whose urge to seek equality is irresistible and the embodiment of right: ‘whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, loc: 14777

Kant.…‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.68 loc: 14789

denied that it was possible to prove the existence of the self loc: 14793

He could say that the mind orders everything which it experiences, and that somehow it has a set of rules by which it can judge those experiences. These rules enable the mind to order the information which it receives about space and time within the universe. Yet the rules themselves come before any experience of space and time, and it is impossible to prove that these rules are true. All that can be said is that they are absolutely necessary to ordering what we perceive and giving it a quality we can label objectivity. loc: 14793

There are vital ‘Ideas’ which are beyond the possibility of experience, and therefore beyond any traditional proof derived by reasoning: Kant called these God, Freedom and Immortality. Although these are not accessible through reason, they can be reached by the conscience within the individual, loc: 14800

Thus there is a God in Kant’s system: the ultimate goal to which (rather than to whom) the individual turns, hoping to meet this goal in an immortality which stretches out beyond our imperfect world. Yet this is a God whose existence cannot be proved; who needs no revelation loc: 14804

Kant’s removal of knowledge in the interests of faith is a solvent of Christian dogma, though it would present no problem for many Christian mystics throughout the history of the Church, who have ended up saying much the same thing. loc: 14807

Catholic monarchs beginning with King José I of Portugal in 1759 brought mounting pressure on successive popes to dissolve the whole Society of Jesus, because they resented its vision of priorities wider than their own, including its loyalty to the papacy. After individual suppressions in various empires, they finally bullied the Pope into complete suppression in 1773. loc: 14823

Joseph II of Austria’s attempts to impose his own vision of reform on the Catholic Church in Habsburg lands. Briskly contemptuous of the contemplative life, the Holy Roman Emperor dissolved a large proportion of the monasteries in his territories, loc: 14840

The people’s reaction in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) was to rise in revolt in 1789, forcing the dying emperor humiliatingly to abandon much of his scheme from the Netherlands to Hungary. loc: 14843

the withering of autonomous Church government in the face of State onslaught: loc: 14847

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789-1815) loc: 14857

France had never established a proper national banking and credit system, and thanks to the centralizing impulse of its monarchy, failed to maintain a national representative body which could cooperate in raising revenue. loc: 14861

The National Assembly was as determined to reform the Church as everything else. Its plan was to create a national Church like that in England, but Catholic in doctrine loc: 14881

bishops would be elected by the entire male population, including the newly emancipated Protestants and Jews.76 loc: 14884

‘Civil Constitution of the Clergy’, passed by the Assembly in 1790, left the Pope with no power, merely a formal respect. loc: 14887

Assembly forced all clergy to take an oath of obedience to the Civil Constitution in January 1791. About half refused loc: 14889

now large sections of the population were cast as opponents of the Assembly: loc: 14891

spurred by provincial rebellions in the name of Catholic Christianity and the King, the State had begun large-scale executions of its aristocratic and clerical enemies loc: 14897

the Jacobins, most extreme Revolutionaries of the French Republic, radicalized the snickering scepticism of French philosophes about the whole Christian message. They came to regard any form of Christian faith as a relic of the ancien régime which they were destroying, though they had to acknowledge that the people on whom they were imposing liberty, equality and fraternity craved for some sort of religion. loc: 14906

Revolution had served long-term notice that the institutional Church and perhaps Christianity itself would be seen as an enemy of the new world. loc: 14917

since before the Revolution it had a virtual monopoly on caring for the poor and helpless, the weakest suffered most by the destruction of Church institutions. loc: 14921

Napoleon attached great importance to religion - not because he cared about it personally, but because he saw that other people cared about it a great deal. loc: 14927

in 1801, he and Pope Pius VII reached an agreement or Concordat, loc: 14931

extensive reorganization of the French Church in partnership with the State, loc: 14934

new structure of appointments and hierarchy among the clergy gave the pope much more power, loc: 14936

the bees caught Napoleon’s imagination, and he adopted them as his dynastic emblem because he could thus identify himself with a French monarch who predated but had literally fathered the ancient Christian monarchy so recently destroyed by the French Revolution. loc: 14949

Napoleon had grasped a truth which had eluded the Revolutionaries whose commitment to the Enlightenment spurred them to abolish the past: tradition and history had their own authority, which could become the ally of change, and at the heart of that tradition in western Europe was Christianity.81 loc: 14952

Popular enthusiasm greeted Pius VII on his visit to Paris in 1804.…This was the beginning of a new era of popular Catholic activism, increasingly directed towards a charismatic papacy. loc: 14957

the Emperor effectively imprisoned Pius for four years. The papacy’s sufferings at the hands of the Revolution transformed the Pope from ineffectual Italian prince to a confessor for the Faith, pitied throughout Europe. loc: 14958

In 1803 all the ecclesiastical territories in the Holy Roman Empire ruled by prince-bishops and abbots were turned over to secular governance, and huge amounts of Church property confiscated; henceforth more than half of German Catholics were under the rule of Protestants.82 loc: 14963

in 1806 the Pope also saw the end of that traditional counterweight to papal power, the Holy Roman Empire itself, when the Emperor Francis II remodelled himself as the Emperor Francis I of Austria. loc: 14966

The future of the Catholic Church was veering towards monarchy, as a result of the revolution which had aimed to overthrow all monarchs. loc: 14967

AFTERMATH OF REVOLUTION: A EUROPE OF NATION-STATES loc: 14972

the only clergyman to regain his temporal jurisdictions (with a few subtractions) was the Pope in Italy. However effective governors the imperial clergy had been - and generally their record had been good - the Enlightenment had destroyed their credibility in government. Thus ended one component of Christendom which had been in place for a thousand years. loc: 14977

large populations were drawn to new manufacturing communities, which might grow as large as any traditional city. More and more people had the experience of building up their own lives without traditional resources of family or custom, loc: 14984

Now the history of Christianities, previously fairly easy to distinguish as three separate stories of non-Chalcedonians and Western and Eastern Chalcedonians, began to merge and interact far more closely. loc: 14990

the French Revolution’s slogan of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ could not be forgotten. The French National Assembly had created a citizen army, whose soldiers were the State, and who therefore had a right to a direct say in it loc: 14994

The French Revolution had overtaken a dynastic kingdom which had seemed as powerful as Britain, and with a far more coherent and ancient ideology of sacred monarchy. As a substitute, it had decreed into existence a nation-state, whose project was to replace a patchwork of jurisdictions, dialects and loyalties by a centralized government, a single French language to be spoken by all, and a shared sense throughout the population that this was the only way to live - the ideology known as nationalism.83 loc: 14998

This idea of a nation became the chief motor of politics in nineteenth-century Europe: loc: 15002

nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion. loc: 15004

Belgium, Italy and Germany all built up national identities during the nineteenth century, loc: 15006

middle-class groups now sought to legislate into being political institutions to give themselves voices in national affairs appropriate to their wealth and talent, at least to share power with the landed aristocracy. They aimed to create structures designed to reward ability and personal achievement rather than birth, and to gain the right to express their political and religious opinions as they wished. This was the politics of liberalism. loc: 15013

respected the rationalism of the Enlightenment less than a new expression of emotion and a search for individual fulfilment. Romanticism became a major colouring for political movements in Europe, loc: 15019

Quite suddenly in the 1830s, radical politics in Britain and France acquired a new word: ‘socialism’. loc: 15023

while Marx prophesied in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what was distinctive about this new phase of socialism was its commitment to materialism and rejection of religions of revelation. loc: 15043

rejection of religious consciousness in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach loc: 15045

Topic: Chapter 22 Europe Re-enchanted or Disenchanted? (1815-1914)

22 Europe Re-enchanted or Disenchanted? (1815-1914) loc: 15051

CATHOLICISM ASCENDANT: MARY’S TRIUMPH AND THE CHALLENGE OF LIBERALISM loc: 15053

prince-bishops, abbacies and cathedral chapters stuffed with aristocratic dimwits had been swept away from the Catholic Church in the former Holy Roman Empire, loc: 15062

in Roman Catholicism its immediate effect was to strengthen the growing concentration of power and emotional loyalty in the papacy, as clergy turned from their traditional aristocratic leaders to the ultimate patron in Rome. loc: 15065

‘Ultramontanes’ were thus those who looked across the Alps to Italy, reverencing the pope’s authority. loc: 15068

Ultramontanism built up its new emotional power in alliance with a startling revival in popular Catholic practice; this was heralded in the eighteenth-century popular resistance to the efforts of monarchs and revolutionaries alike to interfere in the everyday lives of Catholics. loc: 15080

while men began to drift away from the sacramental life of the Church, lay women’s associations played an ever growing part in running parish affairs.4 loc: 15087

The nineteenth century proved one of the most prolific periods for Mary’s activity in the history of the Western Church since the twelfth century. loc: 15097

devout pilgrimage had never been easier or more enjoyable. loc: 15114

Mary’s appearances were surrounded by fierce controversies, as were parallel events such as twenty or so cases of the appearance of stigmata loc: 15115

sceptical clerical men versus heroically insistent women who went on to find clerical and lay support for their experiences. loc: 15118

Catholic ultramontanism represented a unifying ideology against the onslaughts of the Enlightenment, and the pope came to symbolize the sufferings and eventual triumph of the whole Church in the revolutionary era. loc: 15125

It seemed as if the Pope himself might lead Rome into the leadership of a liberal reconstruction of all Europe, but the nationalist revolutions of 1848 revealed his confusion, which readily tipped into his horrified opposition to Italian unification, not least because it would involve an end to the Papal States. loc: 15133

1864,…Pius reacted in frustration by issuing an encyclical letter to which was attached a Syllabus of Errors,…condemned socialism and the principle that non-Catholics should be given freedom of religion in a Catholic state. They culminated in the proposition that it was wrong to believe that the Pope ‘can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’.13 loc: 15138

Catholics could also readily link such destructive fruits of liberalism to that curious offspring of the Scottish Reformation, Freemasonry (see loc: 15144

Freemasonry had become the adopted son of the Enlightenment, loc: 15146

Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power. loc: 15149

Britain and Ireland witnessed a gradual dismantling of public disabilities for Catholics loc: 15166

United States of America, Enlightenment was the benevolent force in separating Church and State, allowing the Catholic hierarchy complete institutional freedom and the chance to exercise pastoral care for a growing flood of Catholic immigrants, protected by the Constitution in the face of widespread Protestant popular hostility loc: 15171

In Lutheran northern Europe, the new constitutional arrangements for state boundaries which so favoured Protestant monarchies were mitigated by a liberal idea of Parität - fair play between Catholics and Protestants loc: 15174

In the southern Netherlands, a revolution of unmistakably liberal character in 1830 against the lumpishly discriminatory rule of a Protestant Dutch monarchy created a new state, Belgium, whose cement across linguistic divisions between French-and Flemish-speakers was its flamboyant Catholicism. loc: 15177

In such varied settings, the Syllabus was a poisonous mistake, yet Pope Pius never admitted as much. loc: 15185

In reaction to the dramatic revival of Marian cults, in 1854 he used his authority to promulgate that doctrine first formulated by English monks in the early twelfth century that Mary had been conceived without the spot of sin loc: 15188

Our Lady showed her approval of the Pope’s action by appearing at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees only four years after the Definition, loc: 15192

produce alarming enthusiasm in other visionaries in Lourdes; large numbers of village women and girls had visions, loc: 15195

Lourdes has become perhaps the most visited of all Christian shrines, Christianity’s answer to Mecca loc: 15201

new definition of papal authority.…December 1869,…The council was paradoxical in its chief work, which was a thoroughgoing denial of the principles of conciliarism. loc: 15206

influenced by the political events around him: the Italian army was surrounding his last territory, the city of Rome. loc: 15206

bishops of the Vatican Council dispersed after a hasty adjournment. Some had gone already, before the moment in July 1870 when the vast majority, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, backed a decree, Pastor aeternus (‘The Eternal Shepherd’). loc: 15209

exalted papal power at their expense, just at the moment when the pope’s temporal power was about to disappear for ever. loc: 15210

the pope had been declared ‘possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals’.23 loc: 15214

It is extraordinary that the conciliarist tradition, which flourished in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Church and which still had weighty advocates in the eighteenth century, should crash in ruin at the time when Europe’s temporal powers were all yielding to the logic of constitutionalism. loc: 15219

At least in its rhetoric, then, the late-nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy set itself up against liberalism, whatever local accommodations it might make to circumstance. Perhaps that was inevitable when liberalism and nationalism humiliated the pope in his own city. loc: 15222

new battle for popular allegiance throughout Catholic Europe. In this, Catholicism might outflank liberalism by proclaiming its commitment to social reform, loc: 15233

encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII restated the Catholic Church’s commitment to social justice for the poor, loc: 15239

French Republican leaders,…Many Republican politicians were still mentally fighting the battles of the 1790s against the Catholic Church. loc: 15252

The sheer nastiness of the ‘Anti-Dreyfusards’ did not present French Catholicism in a good light, particularly their hatred of ‘deicidal’ Jews, whom they saw as staging a conspiracy along with the Freemasons against Christian society. loc: 15255

anticlerical fears that the Catholic Church was sponsoring conspiracy against the Republic, loc: 15257

fault line in French politics between Church and Revolution persisted into the 1960s, loc: 15261

PROTESTANTISM: BIBLES AND ‘FIRST-WAVE’ FEMINISM loc: 15263

Cheap print was naturally of huge importance to a Bible-based religion. The sheer numbers of Bibles produced was staggering: between 1808 and 1901 one Protestant anglophone agency alone, the British and Foreign Bible Society, produced more than 46 million complete Bibles and nearly three times as many New Testaments and sections of the Bible. loc: 15266

Christian feminism became as vital a feature of Protestantism worldwide as in Catholicism. Little of it was expressed in terms of vocations to the religious life. loc: 15278

The earliest and most famous of these prophetesses was Joanna Southcott, loc: 15285

Her first vision in middle age in 1792 led to a large-scale apocalyptic movement which remained resolutely female in its leadership loc: 15286

Isabella and Mary Campbell.…Scottish displays of ‘gifts of the Spirit’…first glimmers of the modern Pentecostal movement loc: 15297

In 1853 a Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, extended the same logic in ordaining Antoinette Brown as minister, the first woman outside the countercultural Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity. loc: 15304

Women offered themselves for missionary work…involved themselves in a great range of causes envisaging radical change in social behaviour, especially the abolition of slavery, and a war on that male-dominated subversion of quiet family evenings and secure finance, indulgence in alcohol. loc: 15308

campaigns against male indifference to the humiliation of women who ended up selling their bodies. loc: 15314

A PROTESTANT ENLIGHTENMENT: SCHLEIERMACHER, HEGEL AND THEIR HEIRS loc: 15317

At the heart of northern Europe was Berlin, capital of a Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy which had led Germany’s successful resistance to Napoleon. loc: 15321

Hohenzollern took as their sacred duty was the creation in 1810 of a new university, loc: 15322

Berlin’s university was intended to set new standards for both teaching and research, and from its foundation it triumphantly succeeded, proving the model for similar institutions throughout the world loc: 15329

conscientious exploration of how Christianity might make the methods of the Enlightenment its own. loc: 15332

initial hesitation in including theology…doubts were overcome by the advocacy of a brilliant migrant from the University of Halle, Friedrich Schleiermacher.…vigorously defended a dual role for it: as a practical discipline for improving general pastoral care in a Christian society, and equally as a general branch of scholarship, with as much potential as any hard science for research and analysis.…eschewing particular confessional allegiance. loc: 15338

For Schleiermacher, Kant’s notion of individual conscience shaped not just knowledge of the paths of morality which humans must follow in order to be true to themselves, but more specifically religious consciousness. loc: 15342

rebelled against rationalism, and saw feeling and emotion as the senior partners of reason. Travelling in the same direction towards the divine, they could leap beyond reason to perceive the infinite. loc: 15346

humans should not merely perceive what must be done in some abstract form, but should make a conscious effort of will to seek the source of all that was holy and dependable: a loving God. loc: 15350

other great world faiths might also perceive this God; such consciousness of God lay at the foundation of all religions, and was the fruit of revelation. loc: 15352

Jesus, who revealed his own divinity by representing the most perfect consciousness of God that there could be. loc: 15353

Hegel was not seized by the personal emotion which made Schleiermacher return to his Pietist inheritance, and sought instead to build a system of knowledge and of being which would dwarf the achievements of Aristotle and go beyond the scepticism of Kant. loc: 15357

Hegel took human consciousness as his starting point, but he denied that anything was beyond the mind’s capacity to know, loc: 15359

All things are in a state of progress, or becoming, within history:…Such syntheses at their higher resolutions can only be understood by a philosophical elite, so all religions are a mediation of higher truths to those less able to perceive them.…Human consciousness is a progress towards absolute knowledge of the Absolute, the Spirit which alone is reality. loc: 15366

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.…divine revelation only revealed humanity to itself. loc: 15374

Kierkegaard.…condemned Hegel’s dialectic path to the Absolute as a betrayal of the individual.…Sin was not an aspect of some impersonal Hegelian process; it was a dark half of human existence, a stark alternative to a road which led to the broken, powerless Christ. loc: 15388

Christian view, which is one of suffering, of enthusiasm for death, belonging to another world.42 loc: 15395

declaration of war on the notion of Christendom, but it was also a declaration of war on all intellectual systems, dogmatic or otherwise: loc: 15397

Kierkegaard’s steady concentration on the sufferings and loneliness of a God-Man on the Cross addresses the perplexities of Western Christianity, loc: 15405

Hegel’s view of progress encompassed the attainment of world peace, but it entailed the emergence of a superior state which would overcome all others in political organization and cultural dominance as part of its recognition of the God of history. loc: 15410

after Napoleon’s defeat, it was characteristic of liberal German Protestantism also to be nationalist; and then after the failure of parliamentary efforts at reunion in 1848-9, also largely monarchist. loc: 15413

A Second Empire (Reich) was proclaimed in 1871, self-consciously an heir to the old Holy Roman Empire, and so a Protestant alternative to that still-existing Catholic empire of the Habsburgs. loc: 15415

Leopold von Ranke,…fusion of nationalism and divine right theory in which liberty and equality took a distinctly subordinate place to monarchy…sense of the divine right of Protestantism.…his vision of the future a sense of the unity of the ‘Teutonic’ nations of northern Europe, loc: 15421

their prosperity and growing power as God’s will against a decaying world Catholicism. loc: 15424

Evangelical Alliance linking British and German Evangelical Protestants, founded in 1846. One of the Alliance’s concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there. This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, loc: 15439

It was with this triumphalist Protestant ideology in the background that the architect of the Second Reich, the Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, launched in 1871 what one of his severest Protestant critics, Rudolf Virchow, Berlin’s independent-minded Professor of Pathology, usefully christened the Kulturkampf - the clash of cultures. What cultures were these? Liberalism and Protestant Germany in alliance against international and conservative Roman Catholicism. loc: 15447

The Chancellor was attempting nothing less than a permanent shift in the balance of power within the new empire, to eliminate Catholicism as a significant political force in northern Europe. loc: 15453

popular Catholic support for suffering clergy was too strong loc: 15457

Already in eighteenth-century German cities, a significant number of people had ceased to go to church. loc: 15462

a great many working-class people turned away from Protestant churches which had identified themselves with the conservative imperial system, and instead embraced a socialism which had begun providing them with a whole alternative subculture for leisure activities and welfare, paralleling what the Church could provide. loc: 15467

BRITISH PROTESTANTISM AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT loc: 15472

In Ireland, a Roman Catholic majority chafed for lack of a voice in state affairs alongside the minority Protestant Irish establishment. loc: 15478

English Protestantism was much more riven than Protestantism in any other part of Europe, apart from the kingdom of the Netherlands. Paradoxically, in the long term this meant that levels of churchgoing remained higher in Britain’s cities than in Germany; England’s tradition of vigorous dissent meant that hostility to the established Church did not turn into general anticlericalism or hostility to Christianity, but was channelled into alternative Christian practice. loc: 15482

British governments actually increased their support for the Church of England in the aftermath of the American Revolution and in nervous reaction to the French Revolution. loc: 15487

Quite abruptly that changed.53 In 1828 the Tory government abolished restrictions on Protestant Dissenters holding public office…Parliament’s passage of Catholic Emancipation the following year;…so the monopoly of members of the Established Churches on government was broken. loc: 15493

Newman and a number of friends mostly associated with Oxford University put forward a new vision of the Church of England loc: 15510

Their project was to minimize the Church of England’s debt to the Reformation which had actually created it as a State Church; to restore a sense of Catholicity to it and to its worldwide offshoots, emphasizing its apostolic succession of bishops across the Reformation divide, its distinctive spirituality and the sacramental beauty of its liturgy. loc: 15511

suggested a Church which combined a truly Catholic character with a national focus, and which might - just might - acknowledge the primacy of a properly ordered papacy. loc: 15516

Tractarians’ problem was that this good opinion was not shared by the bishops whose government in the Church they theoretically exalted. loc: 15529

Behind Laud and the Non-Jurors loomed the far simpler identity of the Roman Catholic Church, towards which Newman was swept by a tide of doubt, loc: 15540

he had already privately come to see the Church of England as nothing better than the Monophysites of the fifth century: no Church at all.60 loc: 15543

widespread High Church outrage that a secular court should thus interfere in a strictly ecclesiastical dispute. As a result, Newman was followed to Rome by several like-minded clergy and prominent laity, loc: 15552

What the Americans first experienced and both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland then had to face up to was the discovery that a Church needs to make decisions for itself, loc: 15569

insistence on the continuity in succession of bishops right back to the Apostles, and the role of the bishop as guardian of the sacraments, it provided a coherent view of what a bishop was and what he should do loc: 15573

High Church commitment to liturgy and episcopal government gave coherence to the worldwide and hitherto unlabelled Church which was emerging from British imperial conquest and American Revolution. loc: 15578

Devout members of the Church of Scotland who valued their Reformed heritage, and the theology of Presbyterian Church order within it, had grown increasingly outraged that, thanks to past compromises with the English government, parish congregations could not choose their own ministers,…in 1843 no fewer than a third of the parish ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland and…schism was not healed until a reuniting of most of the parties concerned in 1929, loc: 15595

the Oxford Movement had aesthetic and emotional advantages to sustain it.…beautiful medieval church buildings…enhanced dignity and solemnity in Anglican worship, loc: 15602

urban poor may not have been that impressed by Catholic ritual, but what they did appreciate was being taken seriously,…Many inner-city strongholds of Anglo-Catholic practice were established as a result, loc: 15609

Church of England, and the Anglican world generally, developed two self-conscious groupings of Anglo-Catholicism and Evangelicalism, plus a ‘Broad Church’ middle ground loc: 15611

developed a spectrum of solutions, stretching between a moderate style which became known as ‘Central’ Churchmanship and an extreme Anglo-Catholicism which delighted in being more Roman than the pope.68 That spectrum has been one of the most fruitful products of that always tense structure, the Anglican Communion. It demands that its adherents use their brains to understand what Anglicanism might be, as well as their aesthetic sense to appreciate how it might reach out to the beauty of divine presence. It encourages a strong sense of paradox and uncertainty, loc: 15620

ORTHODOXY: RUSSIA AND OTTOMAN DECAY loc: 15634

From the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, the victorious Russian tsars claimed to be protectors of all Orthodox Christians under the sultan’s rule, loc: 15638

As the Ottoman Empire further decayed, an exhilarating prospect emerged that an Orthodox tsar might ultimately take the sultan’s place and outdo the sway which Byzantine emperors once enjoyed in Orthodoxy; loc: 15640

steep decline in the power which the Oecumenical Patriarch loc: 15643

Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem published a book in Constantinople which argued that God had created the Ottoman Empire to defend his Church from Latin heresy, loc: 15650

In Russia, the shackling of Church institutions to the tsar’s centralizing bureaucracy loc: 15653

Russian identity was to be founded on a triangle of Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. Whatever the personal religious quirks of Nicholas’s successors, that threefold foundation remained up to 1917.…alternative religious identities might be identified with nationalist dissidence. loc: 15674

pernicious offshoots of official Russian anti-Semitism was a work of propaganda published in 1903,…The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This picture of an imaginary worldwide Jewish conspiracy loc: 15678

Beyond Jews and Greek Catholics, a host of Old Believers and sects of undoubtedly foreign inspiration provoked constant official suspicion and fitful harassment; in turn, they built up a head of anger against the regime, which fed into its eventual collapse.74 The autocracy was increasingly despised even by some of the best and most conscientious Orthodox laypeople and clergy. loc: 15680

extraordinarily high level of churchgoing, which contrasted with the perceptible declines in the West: in 1900, 87 per cent of male and 91 per cent of female believers were recorded at confession and communion, loc: 15689

The spread of higher education created a caste of articulate and ambitious young men with little precedent for their position in Russian society;…In their attempts to find a role for themselves, many were completely alienated from the Church, loc: 15710

at one end of a polarity, absorbed by Slavophile insistence on the self-sufficiency of Russian identity and by a fierce hatred of everything defined as opposing it; at the other, possessed by a revolutionary nihilism which (encouraged by sporadically savage official reprisals) turned to crime or political assassination, as a symbol that there was nothing worthwhile or sacred in contemporary society. loc: 15711

nervous concern of the Russians in preserving the very letter of the tradition received “from the Greeks” ’.81 It is an irony that this yearning to be faithful to a tradition beyond Russia led many churchmen to play a prominent role in the Slavophile movement. loc: 15718

a concept which has become central to modern Russian Orthodox thinking, Sobornost’, the proposition that freedom is inseparable from unity, communion or community. loc: 15723

many Orthodox parish clergy spoke of social progress and questioned tsarist autocracy,…large part played by clergy in the reformist upheavals of 1905.…reaction of the government was to shoot them down, a piece of brutal stupidity which turned demonstrations into attempted revolution. The outburst of popular fury nearly destroyed the regime twelve years before its eventual fall, and left a lasting legacy of mistrust and contempt for imperial rule. loc: 15733

The Orthodox Church had been vital to the survival of a Serb consciousness over the centuries of occupation. Now it had little hesitation in identifying with an expansionist Serbian nationalism, fuelled by a view of history shot through with consciousness of heroic suffering, and inclined to look for support to Russia, which was formal guarantor of Serbian independence from 1830. loc: 15745

The Church hierarchy was initially hostile to the Greek nationalist uprising because of the rebels’ Western liberal rhetoric. The hostility was ended by the savagery of Ottoman reprisals for Greek massacres of Turks in the peninsula in the 1820s, when thousands of clergy were killed, beginning with the Oecumenical Patriarch himself, hanged from his own palace gateway in the Phanar district. Ottoman violence outraged all Christian Europe, and military intervention by Britain, France and Russia eventually forced the Sultan to recognize an independent Greek state.85 loc: 15753

aspiration of the initially small-scale territorial state to expand and encompass Greeks scattered through the southern Balkans and Anatolia. loc: 15766

Greek State Church’s new-found freedom and privilege were exhilarating after four centuries of humiliation, and not surprisingly it became vigorously nationalist. loc: 15767

The denunciation of ‘ethnophyletism’ was a commitment to a vision of Orthodoxy which affirmed that it must never simply be an expression of nationalism or even of a single national culture. loc: 15781

As the Ottoman authorities suffered humiliating losses of territory to new Christian polities which justified independence precisely by their Christian identity, it was not surprising that sultans were increasingly inclined to see their remaining Christian subjects as a threat to their survival, and emphasize their authority with reference to their Muslim identity. loc: 15791

By the end of the nineteenth century, the sultan presided over an empire still multinational and multi-confessional, but in which the traditional mesh of understandings between faith groups was being much eroded, loc: 15797

Russian imperial religious intolerance sent hundreds of thousands of Muslims fleeing for refuge over the Russo-Ottoman border into Ottoman territories, decade on decade. loc: 15805

In 1843 came a grim precedent: a series of massacres of Dyophysite Christian mountain communities by Kurds in what is now Iranian Azerbaijan, provoked by anger at Western missionary activity and Russian military advances. loc: 15807

MASTERS OF SUSPICION: GEOLOGY, BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND ATHEISM loc: 15812

During the eighteenth century, the Newtonian system of mechanics and the deism associated with it seemed to safeguard the place of God as creator, and little in scientific discoveries seemed to suggest a denial of the biblical idea of a benevolent maker of the universe. loc: 15815

argument for God’s existence was based on the evidences for design in creation. loc: 15819

Geological work offered no problem to faith for such scholars; for them, creation stories in Genesis merely spoke figuratively of the time-spans involved in God’s plan. loc: 15829

Charles Darwin,…nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. loc: 15842

ended On the Origin of Species in 1859 with a lyrical reference to the ‘grandeur’ breathed into life by the Creator ‘from so simple a beginning’.92 loc: 15847

remained unmoved in his central contention that humankind was not a special creation of God, but part of the chain of evolution. loc: 15851

There has been no intellectually serious scientific challenge to Darwin’s general propositions since his time. loc: 15859

by the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Communion was headed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, who in earlier years had presented a series of lectures in Oxford on the relation between religion and science which depended on the assumption that evolution was basic truth.95 loc: 15868

Since Hegel saw the Christian God as an image of Absolute Spirit, the stories about God in the Bible must also be images of greater truths which lay behind them. The biblical narratives could be described as myths, and that put them in the same league as the myths of other world religions. loc: 15876

David Friedrich Strauss.…enthusiastic for Hegel’s symbolic approach to Christianity, wanted to apply his analytical skills to the New Testament…New Testament narratives were works of theological symbolism rather than historic fact.…insights, which have become fundamental to Western biblical scholarship, loc: 15885

search had begun for a ‘historical Jesus’, loc: 15893

historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. loc: 15896

archaeology, which explored the lands in the Middle East where the Bible stories were actually set. Christians enthusiastically promoted this, believing that it would confirm biblical truths; [but] ancient Israel seemed much less important or even visible than in its own accounts in the Old Testament, and many works of literature from other cultures were revealed, which indicated that biblical writers had borrowed plenty of their ideas and even texts from elsewhere.97 loc: 15903

Hegel had pictured the world of being and ideas as a continuous struggle; now the struggle, mindless, amoral and utterly selfish, extended to the natural world. In an age deeply concerned to live by moral principles, it was unnerving to suppose that the Creator did not share that concern.…robs the world of moral or benevolent purpose, loc: 15914

Darwin himself,…lost any sense of a purpose in the universe, loc: 15921

Some who felt that science had won the struggle with Christianity were driven to explore the great religions of eastern Asia. A curious construct of religious belief newly named ‘Theosophy’ (from its emphasis on the search for divine wisdom) gained an enthusiastic anglophone middle-class following during the 1890s; it was one of the earliest expressions of that major component of modern Western religion, ‘New Age’ spirituality. loc: 15933

Roman Catholicism had a predictably more combative relationship than mainstream Protestantism with developments in scientific and historical study. loc: 15946

In 1863 Renan produced a Life of Jesus which utterly denied that this Jewish teacher had any divine character. loc: 15949

mood in Rome turned decisively against adventurous scholarly enquiry. Leo XIII initiated a drive against ‘Modernism’ in the Church, which intensified under his successor, Pius X, and destroyed any chance of Roman Catholicism taking a positive attitude to new ideas in biblical and theological scholarship loc: 15951

From the 1870s a series of Evangelical conferences, among the most prominent of which were those held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, reinforced a mood of resistance to Darwinist biology and the Tübingen approach to the Bible. loc: 15955

growing Evangelical enthusiasm for a ‘dispensationalist’ view of God’s purposes in history (see pp. 911-12). From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: Fundamentalism loc: 15959

The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. loc: 15961

Reformation Protestantism turned its back on most of the ancient symbolic, poetic or allegorical ways of looking at the biblical text, and read it in a literal way. As part of that literal reading, concentrating on a line of thought on salvation pursued by St Paul, came the penal substitution theory, loc: 15966

By 1914, then, Western Christianity was caught between two extremes of proclamation: stark and selective affirmations of traditional beliefs and, at the other end of the spectrum, a denial of any authority or reality behind Christian truth-claims. loc: 15970

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.106 Through this, we can truly affirm our being, and for this internal freedom to find fulfilment, it is necessary for the external God to ‘die’, since there is no cosmic order to regulate our lives. loc: 15973

God was not merely in the dock, but condemned and executed. This would lead to another death, as Darwinian biology had already indicated for Nietzsche: ‘morality will gradually perish now: loc: 15982

Paul Ricoeur has described Nietzsche as the central figure in a trilogy of what he usefully terms ‘the masters of suspicion’, the predecessor being Karl Marx and the successor Sigmund Freud: those who gathered together the two previous centuries of questions posed to Christian authority, and persuaded much of the Western world that there was no authority there at all. Behind all three lies Ludwig Feuerbach, who first voiced the idea that God might be part of humanity’s creation, rather than vice versa.109 loc: 15985

Topic: Chapter 23 To Make the World Protestant (1700-1914)

23 To Make the World Protestant (1700-1914) loc: 15997

SLAVERY AND ITS ABOLITION: A NEW CHRISTIAN TABOO loc: 15998

A drunken and naked Noah was humiliated when his son Ham saw him in this state, and subsequently Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his descendants to slavery at the hands of Ham’s elder brothers, Shem and Japheth.5 loc: 16026

this story was regularly trotted out by slave traders both Christian and Muslim to justify enslaving Africans, children of Ham.6 It loc: 16029

in the late fifteenth century, a celebrated Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac ben Abravanel, suggested that Caanan’s descendants were black, while those of his uncles were white, and so all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis 9 gives no support to this belief; loc: 16036

that independent-minded Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall, who had recently had the courage to make a public apology for his part in the Salem witch trials (see pp. 755-6), was one of the first. In 1700 he wrote a pamphlet highlighting a comment in Mosaic Law which had not been much considered before: ‘He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death’ (Exodus 21.16). Coolly Sewall’s pamphlet then demolished the standard Christian wisdom of his day on slavery, argument by argument.11 loc: 16048

Enlightenment…The Encylopédie’s entry on ‘Commerce’ furiously attacked the slave trade, loc: 16053

Montesquieu,…pitilessly dissected the various arguments justifying slavery, biblical and Classical, and showed their inadequacy.12 loc: 16055

Pennsylvania Quakers, whose tradition enabled them to be less reverent towards biblical authority…anticipated Sewall by twelve years, with a petition against slavery in Pennsylvania from some Dutch Quakers in 1688.…came down firmly against slavery of any sort in 1758, the first Christians corporately to do so. loc: 16064

Granville Sharp,…Sharp was a prolific biblical critic, turning his scriptural scholarship to constructing a case against slavery which would have a biblical base. loc: 16069

1772, ‘Somersett’s Case’. In the judgement on this case, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield found in favour of an escaped slave,…Mansfield refused to accept that the institution of slavery existing in eighteenth-century England could be linked to the historic legal status of serfdom or villeinage recognized in English common law: logically, therefore, slavery had no legal existence in England.14 loc: 16074

it became the ambition of one of Sharp’s fellow Evangelicals, William Wilberforce, to do precisely the opposite, and legislate first the British slave trade and then slavery out of existence throughout the growing British Empire.…1807 he achieved his first goal.…1833, the old man heard his friends had won that second victory, receiving the news just three days before he died. loc: 16084

Charles James Fox…‘Personal freedom,’ he insisted, ‘must be the first object of every human being . . . a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal’.17 loc: 16093

whether slavery’s abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West’s realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. loc: 16095

the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W. E. H. Lecky, that the ‘unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations’. loc: 16097

one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties, spearheaded by British Evangelicals loc: 16101

Sierra Leone colonists who started arriving in 1792 should be Africans to whom freedom had been restored, either liberated on the West African coast or shipped back from the Americas complete with Protestant Christian values. loc: 16115

The new venture soon developed a hierarchical pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population,…did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, loc: 16127

From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, loc: 16130

British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope Gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the slave trade.22 loc: 16134

A PROTESTANT WORLD MISSION: OCEANIA AND AUSTRALASIA loc: 16138

sudden upwelling of commitment to worldwide mission.…the 1790s added a new urgency. The events of the French Revolution suggested that a century of Evangelical expectations for the coming end might at last be fulfilled. loc: 16153

By 1830, it has been plausibly suggested, around 60 per cent of British Protestants were involved in some variety of Evangelical religious practice, loc: 16159

almost everywhere where British missions flourished, British official hegemony eventually followed. loc: 16176

Stirred by the triumphs and quasi-martyrdom of Captain Cook, the London Missionary Society made Pacific islands its especial priority straight away in the 1790s. loc: 16178

leaders saw the Pacific hosting no primeval Edens but rather sinks of ancient corruption needing urgent Protestant remedy - not least for relaxed sexual mores, loc: 16186

first voyage to Tahiti…An entire community of thirty-plus hard-working practical English people embarked not exactly to colonize, as Puritans had done in New England, but to set the degraded islanders a good Protestant example as a mission community whose intentions emulated the communal ideal…settlements planted in this voyage of the Duff were disappointing in the extreme; the colonists exhibited some spectacular backsliding from godly ways, loc: 16194

fell back on a model of activity equally prone to chance but less in need of elaborate infrastructure: the single male who, with luck, training and prayer, would impress and motivate local leaders, loc: 16195

demographic disaster undermined faith in traditional religion and lent plausibility to those respected local leaders who decided to give the new religion their backing. loc: 16201

Rather than a detailed grasp of Christian theology, they brought charisma, a shrewd sense of what might appeal to local leaders in the Christian package and a determination to destroy the power of traditional cults. loc: 16208

swelling number of colonizing immigrants had changed the balance of sympathy among Church leaders of European origins; most supported the military suppression of Maori aspirations. That terribly undermined existing Churches, loc: 16236

aboriginal peoples of Australia.…Pushed aside after 1788 by British colonial settlement which aimed (with broad success) to reproduce British patterns of life and religion in an infinitely sunnier climate, the aboriginals were left the vast expanses of their continent which the British did not want. loc: 16241

Traditional leadership and cultural practices could not be sustained, and in any case, the general assumption of missionaries of whatever denomination was that it was not worth trying: aboriginals were a dying race, and it would be best if they were integrated into the modern world, loc: 16245

AFRICA: AN ISLAMIC OR A PROTESTANT CENTURY? loc: 16266

In the early nineteenth century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular all through the century.40 In fact, Christianity came to equal Islam in outreach in Africa, and this spurt of Christian growth was in the first place a mission pushed forward by self-help. loc: 16285

Through much of the continent, both trade and the need for pastoralists and arable farmers to move on from easily exhausted soils or pastures encouraged Africans to travel over long distances.…Young men from inland went to find work on the coast; they returned home, having witnessed a new religion and sung its hymns. Women were the mainstay of trade in West Africa, and in Sierra Leone many Krio women highly gifted in commerce were seized by enthusiasm for Christian faith. loc: 16295

rediscovery of the vital role of catechists…Local voices had much more chance of conveying what the missionaries were trying to bring in an alien cultural form: joy. loc: 16303

At the heart of Christianity is a book full of signs and wonders testifying to God’s power, and Africans were accustomed to looking for those.…explanations of the mysteries of world origins and creation:…full of genealogies: most African societies delighted in such repetitions,…confidently expected concrete results from the power of God. loc: 16317

The Bible speaks without reserve about witches and at one point it suggests that they should not be allowed to live.42 African societies knew witches well, and many allotted power to witch-finders.…witch-killings marched in step with the growth of African-initiated Churches.43 loc: 16323

missionaries were repeatedly expected to bring rain where there was no rain. loc: 16325

Polygamy was one of the great stumbling blocks for Western mission,…ancient marital customs confirmed in the private life of the patriarchs in the Old Testament; loc: 16340

difficulties which it caused in recruiting local Catholic priests in the face of the Church’s rule of universal clerical celibacy. loc: 16355

vigorous movement through most of Africa to found Churches independent of European interference: loc: 16364

a hugely ambitious expedition in the River Niger basin, during which fever struck down 130 of 145 Europeans and killed forty of them.æNiger catastrophe seemed to show that Africans were better suited to withstand local conditions. loc: 16374

African reactions to a political situation transformed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A complete partition of Africa by European powers, through the Congress of Berlin in 1884-5, resulted in the destruction of a vast number of local power structures. loc: 16443

Christians had advantages. Now that colonial governments were demanding the regular collection of taxes and the filling in of forms, Western-style education was at a premium and only the Churches could offer it. loc: 16451

Churches became alarmingly identified with the new imperialism.…provoked widespread resentment against their missions. loc: 16455

Amid the general European ascendancy, two ancient Christian Churches stood out as not having first arrived in Africa with the slave traders. Both were Miaphysite: the Copts of Egypt and the Ethiopians.…Copts emerged from three centuries of beleaguered existence to a new prosperity, loc: 16462

The CMS implemented a scheme to introduce European patterns of education; the Copts eagerly seized on the opportunity and were careful to take it over for themselves. loc: 16469

Ethiopia’s continuing existence was the most emphatic reminder that Christianity was an ancient African faith, and the resurgence of its Church owed little to the sort of quasi-colonial assistance which benefited the Copts. loc: 16475

Menelik II, brought the empire to an unprecedented size, and delivered the most lasting defeat suffered by a colonial power during the nineteenth century when he crushed the invading Italians at Adwa in 1896. It was an event celebrated all over Africa: a sign (like the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire nine years later) that Europeans were not all-powerful. It was also a triumph for authentically African Christianity, which might now turn to Ethiopia for inspiration. loc: 16488

Fascist Italy sought to avenge the shame of Adwa in its invasion and destructive occupation of Ethiopia in 1935…Christians sneered at the Italian Pope for his lack of condemnation of fellow Italians: loc: 16503

Ethiopia has inspired many Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans to express their pride in Africa through their adherence to Rastafari. This syncretistic religious movement takes its title from the pre-coronation name of the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and it meticulously grounds its beliefs in Old and New Testament, loc: 16505

INDIA: THE GREAT REBELLION AND THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL MISSION loc: 16508

From the 1790s most British Protestants did not share the particular preoccupation of the London Missionary Society with the Pacific; they viewed former Mughal India as the flagship of mission, since it contained Britain’s largest and most rapidly expanding colonial territories. loc: 16511

in the long term India was to prove the biggest failure of European missionary enterprise. loc: 16516

The Honourable East India Company (which governed British India at one remove from the British Crown until 1858) was initially extremely wary of disturbing Hindu and Islamic sensibilities.…From 1805 the Company’s English administrators were prepared for government in its English training college at Haileybury, among whose staff Evangelicals were prominent, and by the 1830s these boys were in positions of executive power. loc: 16524

the Great Indian Rebellion, or first Indian War of Independence, long called by the British ‘the Indian Mutiny’.75 The most serious nineteenth-century uprising against any Western colonial power, it was partly triggered by efforts to promote Christianity in India, bringing Muslims and Hindus into alliance loc: 16532

Queen Victoria’s proclamation ending Company rule in 1858 emphasized that the new government was under instruction to ‘abstain from any interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects’, loc: 16542

it ran parallel to the legislation ending virtually all legal discrimination among Christians in Great Britain itself. loc: 16544

Christian missionaries were now stripped of official support in the largest colonial possession of the world’s greatest power.77 loc: 16545

British-run schools continued to flourish, but they did not deliver many converts loc: 16550

In fact the challenge to faith and intellect posed by the Christian onslaught had prompted Hindus to self-examination and eventually to self-confidence and pride in their heritage. loc: 16554

Indian missionary struggles and setbacks bred a new spirit of humility among Christians. It was among Protestants in India that the impulse first arose to forget old historic differences between denominations which meant little in new settings and to seek a new unity. This was the chief origin of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement loc: 16567

CHINA, KOREA, JAPAN loc: 16569

The arrival of Christianity and interference by European powers identified with the Christian faith contributed to a catastrophic rebellion, and almost a century would follow from the collapse of the Qing in 1911 before the Churches could free themselves from association with imperial humiliation. loc: 16572

British, who made up their trade deficit with China by exporting opium grown in India.…The trade grew huge, and it led to a crisis of addiction throughout the Chinese Empire which the imperial authorities desperately tried to contain, chiefly with efforts to prohibit imports and destroy shipments of drugs as they arrived. Britain went to war in 1839 to defend its profits, and its technological superiority ensured military and naval victory. loc: 16580

Missionaries arrived in association with this less than perfectly virtuous result, because the Treaty of Nanjing opening the trade once more in 1842 also reversed an imperial prohibition on Christian belief proclaimed a century before.…mission finances were kept afloat by the credit network maintained by the opium merchants loc: 16585

The knowledge of military defeat and the social misery caused by the opium trade made ordinary Chinese not only hostile to missionaries but disgusted with their own regime;…Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in 1850.…Hong Xiuquan,…His movement embodied an incendiary combination of nostalgia for the Ming dynasty, traditional rebellious zeal to end corruption and a mélange of notions from Christian sources, including a drive to social equality - all united by Hong’s continuing visions from God.81 loc: 16595

sudden escalation of Western interference in traditional culture led to such ideological fusions, in which the Christian idea of the Last Days was a favourite galvanizing force, usually with devastating results. loc: 16597

the most destructive civil war in world history,…Taiping created an entire governmental structure, with a formidable army,…Taiping military power collapsed in the wake of Hong Xiuquan’s final illness in 1864,…empire never recovered. loc: 16614

Like Catholics before them, they mostly found the basic task of mastering the fearful complexity of the Chinese language humiliatingly difficult, and often their reaction was to externalize their own shortcomings.…Protestant missionaries took a very negative view of the religion which Chinese culture had bred, so full of ritual and idolatry loc: 16620

American Commodore Perry brought his naval squadron to force openness on Japan in 1853, it was the beginning of a revolution in Japanese society which led to the restoration of imperial government in 1868, the end of two centuries of the Tokugawa shoguns’ monopoly on real power.…did not lead and has never yet led to a new flowering of Christianity in Japan. loc: 16658

[Bible and self help books helped fuel] crash-course in the useful aspects of modernity, loc: 16662

Korean monarchy patronized a native shamanism much cross-fertilized by Buddhism and its guiding philosophy was a form of Confucianism long ago imported from China. By the late eighteenth century, the Korean state was in trouble, and seemed to be incapable of reconstruction after a series of natural disasters which, in combination with chronic misgovernment, saw the population actually falling. loc: 16670

From Yi Sŭng-hun’s return in 1784 to the first great persecution of 1801, Korean Catholicism spread beyond its elite yangban origins to gain around ten thousand adherents - this with the help of just one resident Chinese priest from 1795, martyred in 1801.…monarchy continued to pursue the total destruction of the alien religion. Thousands died or were tortured, the worst phase being the latest, in 1866-71. loc: 16689

Christianity might have been associated, as in China, with the humiliation of a decaying and ineptly Westernizing monarchy by Western powers, but already it had established its indigenous character. It is not surprising that both Catholics and Protestants were significant in maintaining Korean national identity in the decades after Japanese armies had seized their country in 1910. loc: 16705

Christianity was a symbol of resistance to colonialism, not its accompaniment. That consciousness has shaped the extraordinary dynamism of Korean Christianity in the last half-century. loc: 16710

AMERICA: THE NEW PROTESTANT EMPIRE loc: 16711

At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.94…by 1914 it was approaching half - this in a country which in the same period through immigration and natural growth had seen its numbers balloon from 8.4 million to 100 million. loc: 16719

That growth reflected the dynamism, freedom, high literacy rates and opportunity available in this society, and the Christian religion seemed to owe its success to a competitive and innovative spirit as much as did American commerce and industry.95 Americans were justifiably proud of themselves. It was easy to cast their pride in the language of their religion loc: 16720

The majority of the Republic’s churchgoers, and the overwhelming majority in positions of power, were Protestants of some description, although the Roman Catholic Church also benefited hugely from immigration during the century and by around 1850 became America’s largest single denomination. loc: 16729

New England Congregationalists were disorientated by their loss of established status and cultural leadership…Many of their influential leaders were still children of the Enlightenment, seeking a rational faith for a new Republic, and they led their congregations into Unitarianism.…Others resisted that drift, took their stand on a generous reshaping of Reformed predestinarianism, and emphasized various campaigns for moral and social improvement loc: 16740

less genteel in the South and in the growing tide of settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. Here the revivals of the first Awakening were seen again, sweeping congregations past their ministers’ expectations in wordless but often highly noisy expressions of apparent liturgical nihilism.…Evangelical mode which generally valued a common fervent style and proclamation of sin and redemption more than confessional background or history. loc: 16750

one of the first of these devotional explosions at Gasper River in Kentucky in 1800, loc: 16753

there developed increasingly original forms of Christian experience. It was predictable that American Evangelical excitement should again look to the Last Days…Surely America and not Old Europe was to be the setting for God’s final drama: loc: 16762

William Miller,…preaching his startling message through the nation that the Advent of Christ was due in 1843 - much excitement - then 1844 - even more excitement - and then followed the Great Disappointment. loc: 16766

nineteenth century’s many visionary teenage girls,…Ellen G. Harmon…Seventh-Day Adventism…Mrs White’s [Haarmon] Adventist benefactor and collaborator, Dr John H. Kellogg, whose breakfast cereals and benevolence brought lasting and worldwide prosperity to the Adventist Church.100 loc: 16773

One Millerite schism produced the Jehovah’s Witnesses: millenarian, pacifist and with strong views against blood transfusions. loc: 16775

Spiritualism and the Church of Christ Scientist (products of yet more visionary women) both spread themselves from the USA through the Western world loc: 16781

Joseph Smith,…The boy, both dreamer and likeable extrovert, on the edge of so many cultures - Evangelicalism, self-improvement, popular history and archaeology, Freemasonry - constructed out of them a lost world…The Book, written long before largely by Moroni’s father, Mormon, was the story of God’s people, their enemies and their eventual extinction in the fourth century CE. loc: 16796

the enemies who destroyed them were the native peoples whom Smith’s society called Red Indians.104…Now the spiritual descendants of Mormon were called to restore their heritage before the Last Days. loc: 16798

Smith, now in charge of his own private army in Illinois, was fortified by fresh revelations to declare his candidacy in the 1844 presidential election. loc: 16808

one of Smith’s later revelations, posthumously released to the public in 1852, which had interesting resonances with the battles then going on in Protestant missions in Africa. He had been told that he must authorize polygamy. loc: 16814

Wholesome prosperity such as the youthful Smith might have envied has become a worldwide Mormon speciality, together with a systematic approach to spreading the message which has hardly been equalled in the Christianity which reserves itself the description Evangelical. loc: 16825

Among Southern whites, the defence of slavery slid into a defence of white supremacy, since that was a useful way to unite the white population behind a coherent ideology; loc: 16835

Abraham Lincoln, was a rationalist Unitarian who had left behind his childhood strict Calvinist Baptist faith for something more like the cool creeds of the most prominent Founding Fathers, loc: 16842

Pentecostals take their name from the incident described in the Book of Acts when, at the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and they ‘began to speak in other tongues’,…roots are in the extraordinary variety of American Protestant religion and they have no single origin. Echoing in Pentecostalism are the jerking, barking, running ‘exercises’ of the Kentucky camp meeting, which had their precedent in the extrovert emotion of the Moravians, loc: 16875

a ‘Holiness’ movement sprang out of the teaching of the early Methodists, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit could bring an intense experience of holiness or sanctification into the everyday life of any believing Christian.…sanctification in the Christian life as being effected by a ‘baptism with the Holy Ghost’. loc: 16881

‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ inspired by Edward Irving (see p. 829). In its conferences at Albury the CAC had evolved a tidy scheme of a series of ‘dispensations’ structuring world history, a scheme just as comprehensive as the pronouncements of Joachim of Fiore; the dispensations would culminate (and that quite soon) in Christ’s Second Coming before the millennium. loc: 16889

John Nelson Darby,…the Brethren,…in a notable innovation, he looked at Matthew 24.36-44 and saw there Jesus’s prophecy of a ‘Rapture’ in which one man would be taken and one man left.119 Second, completing the ‘dispensations’, he asserted that Christ would return to reveal the final mystery in this Rapture and lead the saints in the last thousand years, loc: 16894

Darby’s picture of Christ’s coming was ‘premillennial’ and not post-millennial like Edwards’s (see p. 759), and it did not encourage any sunny Enlightenment optimism about human prospects: only Christ could effectively change the world, not human effort. loc: 16898

longing of Protestant blacks for full acceptance in American society, a widespread weariness at denominational barriers amid so much shared Evangelical rhetoric and an equally widespread instinct that Protestant emphasis on sermons and the intellectual understanding of the word of God did not give enough room for human emotion. loc: 16905

Around 1900, speaking in ‘tongues’ began playing a major role: loc: 16908

What the Pentecostals did was to kidnap the concept of Spirit Baptism from other Evangelicals in the Holiness Movement and the Keswick Conference tradition. They then made it not a Second Blessing but a third, beyond conversion and sanctification. This Third Blessing would invariably be signalled by the sign of speaking in tongues. loc: 16920

Eventually Pentecostalism affected the older Churches too, as some of those drawn to the movement did not leave their existing Churches and formed ‘charismatic’ groups within them. loc: 16936

Topic: Chapter 24 Not Peace but a Sword (1914-60)

24 Not Peace but a Sword (1914-60) loc: 16944

A WAR THAT KILLED CHRISTENDOM (1914-18) loc: 16946

By the end of the 1960s, the alliance between emperors and bishops which Constantine had first generated was a ghost; a fifteen-hundred-year-old adventure was at an end. loc: 16958

They went to war over a long-standing cause of instability for Christendom: the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, or, more precisely, the competition to dominate its former Balkan conquests. loc: 16962

His murderers [Archduke Ferdinand] were part of an Orthodox-inspired movement to create a Greater Serbia which would include this religiously pluralistic territory. loc: 16965

All sides excitedly coupled the theme of Christian faith with national unity as they launched their armies, loc: 16974

German Protestant theologians and academics, Harnack’s colleagues, had internalized the new imperial ideal with remarkable and unedifying speed after the Hohenzollern triumph of 1870-71. loc: 16980

Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, in one sermon in Advent 1915 called on the British Army ‘to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old’. loc: 16985

in 1917 came the first fall of a Christian empire, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church which had so long styled itself the Third Rome. loc: 16994

Even in his drunkenness and promiscuity, Rasputin looks remarkably like the Holy Fools whom we have met repeatedly in their long journey from the eastern Mediterranean - and so his many admirers saw him. loc: 17002

forced abdication on the Tsar in March 1917; a Provisional Government followed.10 loc: 17008

By August a council of bishops, clergy and laypeople had gathered in Moscow to make decisions for the whole Church, something unprecedented in Russia’s history. They elected the first patriarch for two centuries, since Peter the Great had brought an end to the patriarchate. loc: 17011

The Bolsheviks were not fighting tsarist autocracy: that had already been dismantled. They saw themselves as instituting a new world order, loc: 17020

Our Revolution is a rebellion in the name of the conscious, rational, purposeful and dynamic principle of life, against the elemental, senseless biological automism of life: that is, against the peasant roots of our old Russian history, against its aimlessness, its non-technological character, against the holy and idiotic philosophy of Tolstoy’s Karataev in War and Peace.12 loc: 17023

For the Bolsheviks, the Church was the embodiment of the society which they were trying to destroy. loc: 17027

The civil war which was already raging by then, and which ended in 1922 with Bolshevik victory, marked the beginning of seventy years for the Russian Orthodox Church which represent one of the worst betrayals of hope in the history of Christianity. During those terrible decades, the destruction of life and of the material beauty of church buildings and art outdid anything in Orthodox experience since the Mongol invasions; the Orthodox faithful were made strangers amid the culture which they had shaped over centuries. loc: 17030

Mennonites expressed their difference from the world around them by renouncing all forms of coercion or public violence, soldiering of course included. Their hard work and orderly peaceableness made them attractive colonists for the tsars, and by the time of the revolution hundreds of thousands lived in Mennonite communities,…Mennonites would not fight back when attacked. Men were murdered, women raped, everything was stolen. For many of them, it was too much. They fought back and sent perpetrators of the outrages packing - but now they had to face the wrath of brethren and sisters who said that they were betraying Mennonite principles.…most made new lives in communities in North America; but they did not forget the controversy. loc: 17047

The twin Protestant and Catholic heirs of the Holy Roman Empire now quit their thrones, loc: 17050

The third to fall was the Ottoman Sultan, who had entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria, and who was ejected from his palaces in 1922; the caliphate was formally abolished two years later. loc: 17053

Of all the European imperial crowned heads, only the British King-Emperor remained.15 loc: 17054

the reformist ‘Young Turk’ regime in Constantinople saw the Christians of the region as fifth columnists for Russia (with some justification) and was determined to neutralize them.…deaths of more than a million Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1916. loc: 17060

Dyophysites in Mesopotamia and the mountains of eastern Turkey…‘Assyrian Christians’.…after the war the British reneged on previous promises. Instead Assyrians found themselves part of a newly constructed multi-ethnic British puppet kingdom, Iraq, dominated by Muslims, where they fared increasingly badly at the hands of the Hashemite monarchy and its Republican successors. loc: 17072

With the Ottoman Empire prostrate, Greek armies occupied much of western Anatolia (Asia Minor), continuing various Balkan land-grabs from the Ottomans which they had carried out in the years immediately before 1914. loc: 17078

Turkish armies then rallied under Mustapha Kemal, who would soon restyle himself as Kemal ‘Atatürk’, and in September 1922, as the routed Greeks fled, Smyrna, one of the greatest cities in the Greek-speaking world, was near-obliterated by fire (see Plate 51). In the flames perished Asia Minor’s nineteen centuries of Christian culture, and ten earlier centuries of Greek civilization.…flood of refugees in both directions across the Aegean Sea was formalized into population exchanges on the basis of religion, not language.…Christians became Greeks regardless of what language they then spoke, and Muslims became Turks. loc: 17085

Greek citizen population of some 300,000 in 1924 and 111,200 in 1934 has now been reduced to a probable figure of two thousand or less. The present Oecumenical Patriarch is a lonely figure in his palace in the Phanar.…near-death of Orthodox Christianity in the Second Rome loc: 17100

French Crown arrogated to itself the role of protector of Levantine Christians. Accordingly it secured the creation of a French mandate over a coastal and mountainous region described as the Lebanon, whose boundaries closely followed the strength of the population of Maronite Christians - an indigenous Church of the area, originally Monothelete in its views on the nature of Christ loc: 17105

Virtually all remaining Armenians fled, leaving eloquent ruins of Christian churches behind them, and the Dyophysites of the Church of the East were soon mostly in Iraq.…Urfa itself, cradle of Christianity’s alliance with monarchy, now has virtually no Christians left. loc: 17118

GREAT BRITAIN: THE LAST YEARS OF CHRISTIAN EMPIRE loc: 17127

Alone among the major combatants in the European war, Britain retained its pre-war combination of monarchy and distinct national established Churches loc: 17131

The Protestants, predominant in the north-eastern Irish counties of Ulster, refused to accept any deal for Home Rule across the island which would leave them in the hands of a Roman Catholic majority, and open violence broke out only a few months after the worldwide Armistice loc: 17138

Northern Ireland consolidated itself into a state where majority Protestant rule would be entrenched - not least because both Catholics and Protestants resisted the attempt of the Westminster government to create truly non-sectarian education at primary school level; thanks to the Catholic Church’s firm instructions, Catholic parents overwhelmingly boycotted state secondary schools, leaving them to Protestants.23 loc: 17150

virulent anti-Catholicism of interwar Northern Ireland was echoed elsewhere in the Atlantic Isles, especially in Wales and Scotland.…popular anti-Catholicism ran deep in English consciousness.28 loc: 17179

Far more acceptable than Catholicism to many ‘Low Church’ Anglicans was Freemasonry: loc: 17185

CATHOLICS AND CHRIST THE KING: THE SECOND AGE OF CATHOLIC MISSIONS loc: 17188

similar triumph for Rome after 1919 came from the foundation of an equally fervently Catholic Polish Republic, loc: 17193

Pius XI sought to rally Catholics against what he denounced as secularism or laicism in an encyclical of 1925, Quas primas, the brand-new feast which he introduced as a symbol for his campaign was that of Christ the King.…Christ the King, or at least his Vicar on earth, had the task and perhaps even the prospect of integrating all society under a single monarchy. loc: 17201

Pius IX had on principled grounds refused any monetary compensation for the Papal States and its tax revenues from the Italian government, and the only way of filling the gap was by soliciting financial support from devout Catholics - what had been known in medieval Europe as ‘Peter’s Pence’.…The papacy was looking to every last Catholic man, woman and child for help in carrying out its task, and in return it delved much deeper into the everyday lives of the faithful.…in 1907 the Pope decreed that the minimum age for first communion should be lowered from twelve or fourteen to seven. Around that ‘first communion’ there rapidly grew a new Catholic folk culture, a public celebration of family life in the parish church, loc: 17212

Catholic Church was now undergoing one of the greatest expansions in its history, loc: 17218

Benedict’s resulting apostolic letter of 1919, Maximum illud,…As well as looking forward to a wholly native leadership in all regions of the Church, the letter pointed out how damaging the reproduction of European nationalisms had been for work in other continents,…Maximum illud heralded an age in which the Roman Catholic Church has become the largest single component in the Christian world family of Churches.34 loc: 17231

the official Church in Latin America habitually competed with liberal politicians for the allegiance of the population. loc: 17244

The prolonged rule of Mexico’s clericalist President Díaz provoked revolution in 1910, associated with a militant anti-Catholicism both popular and official. loc: 17256

Church fought back for control of Mexican life: the Mexican bishops in 1914 anticipated Pope Pius XI’s later move by proclaiming that Christ was King of Mexico.…In 1926 the Primate of Mexico used the ultimate weapon available to him when he suspended all public worship, all sacraments, in protest against the crippling of the Church’s activities, particularly its loss of control over schooling.…Cristeros drew their support from those regions of Mexico where there was a long tradition of lay leadership in the Church,…in the end the government saw that it could not outface this massive affirmation of Church life, loc: 17273

Vatican…Everywhere it saw the chief enemy of Christianity as socialism or Communism. loc: 17282

history of the interwar years is of democracy’s steady subversion by authoritarian regimes.…Much more destructive were movements which despised the aristocratic past as much as they did bourgeois democracy, and espoused an extreme form of nationalism which degenerated into racism.…Fascism. loc: 17289

Pius X, who popularized the word ‘Modernism’ as a symbol of all that was anathema to good Catholics, loc: 17292

The Duce, Mussolini, might personally be an atheist no better than Maurras, but he was able to put his annexation of the Italian state to uses of which the Pope thoroughly approved, notably in suppressing the Communist Party. loc: 17304

the Duce patently wanted a deal to earn himself goodwill from Catholics. So in the Lateran accords of 1929, the Vatican State was born, the world’s smallest sovereign power, the size of an English country-house garden, carrying with it a silver spoon in the form of 1,750 million lire, presented by the Italian government…Pope handed over financial administration of this windfall to a suave and brilliant banker, Bernardino Nogara,…Nogara gained more power in Catholicism than had been enjoyed by any layman since the Emperor Charles V…‘greatest financial trust in the world’.43 Suddenly the Vatican could afford to be generous, loc: 17315

overtrusting agreement of Germany’s Catholic Party, the Centre (Zentrum), who in March 1933 decided to vote for an Enabling Act in the Reichstag, giving Hitler supreme power and suspending democracy.…the future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, negotiated a concordat with Hitler which promised to preserve freedoms for the Catholic Church in the new ‘Third Reich’,…dissolution of the Zentrum and Catholic trade unions, and a ban on any political activity on the part of the Church’s clergy. loc: 17326

the poison of Nazi black propaganda and violence was visited selectively on Catholicism, loc: 17327

encyclical directed in German to Germany, Mit brennender Sorge (‘With burning anxiety’), which was successfully smuggled into the country to be read simultaneously from every Catholic pulpit on Palm Sunday 1937;…denounced the harassment of the Church and condemned the presuppositions of Nazi racism. The encyclical was one of the few nationally coordinated public acts of defiance of the regime before it fell in 1945; loc: 17332

Rome still saw Communism as a greater representative of evil than Fascism.…It was a movement which among much else ‘strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse’. loc: 17343

The Spanish Republic set up on the fall of the monarchy in 1931 mimicked amid a raft of social and economic reforms all the anticlerical policies with which the Church was familiar…the Republicans charged destructively over the small certainties of everyday Catholic life, infuriating large numbers of ordinary Catholics who might not otherwise have had any special animus against the Republic…newly emerged image of Christ the King became the figurehead for the political Right, loc: 17355

Electoral gains for a new Spanish Catholic party in 1934 provoked fury from anarchists and socialists; attacks on church buildings were now accompanied by the killing of clergy. loc: 17356

When the parties of the Left won elections in 1936, a group of army leaders, now in alliance with a mushrooming ‘Falangist’ movement inspired by Fascism, determined to overturn the result by force. loc: 17357

British MI6 officer, Major Hugh Pollard, undertaking this as a freelance operation because he was a devout Catholic…proud of having fulfilled ‘the duty of a good Catholic to help fellow Catholics in trouble’. loc: 17364

greatest anticlerical bloodletting Europe has ever known’. loc: 17369

When Franco was at last victorious in 1939, Pope Pius XII broadcast to the Spanish people, praising Spain because it had ‘once again given to the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith’. loc: 17375

No protests went up from the Vatican when Hitler invaded the helpless remnant of Czechoslovakia, loc: 17377

Franco’s regime reasserted the Spain of the 1492 expulsion,…Spain was conceived of as racially pure, deferential to paternalistic authority, corporatist, uniformly Catholic. loc: 17382

THE CHURCHES AND NAZISM: THE SECOND WORLD WAR loc: 17384

Protestant leaders shared the general sense that an undefeated German army had been betrayed by enemies of the Reich [in WWI].…overwhelmingly regarded the foundation of a Republic as part of that betrayal; feeling was particularly bitter in Prussia, loc: 17390

when the Weimar Republic came into existence in 1919, 80 per cent of its Protestant clergy sympathized with its enemies, and were monarchist and angrily nationalist. loc: 17392

German Protestant theology was that some of its assumptions could turn some of its greatest practitioners into fellow-travellers with Nazi anti-Semitism. They were Lutherans: they naturally took as a basic assumption Luther’s great theological contrast between Law and Gospel, or Judaism and Christianity. loc: 17395

scholars customarily analysed the Gospel as the product of conflict between Petrine Christians, who wished to remain close to Judaism, and Pauline Christians, who wished to take it in a new direction. In the case of Adolf von Harnack, this resulted in rejecting the whole of the Old Testament as not part of the canon of scripture,…led on to a welcome for Hitler’s assumption of power, and to a number of anti-Semitic biases…setting up of a Protestant body calling itself the German Christians, a movement supporting the aim of the Nazis to eliminate Jewish influence from the Church, loc: 17405

In order to account for the Saviour’s origins in Galilee, German Christians suggested that the area had been an enclave of Aryan ethnic identity.…appealed to a selection of opinions of Luther (such as his intemperate remarks about the Jews and his theme of obedience to superior powers) loc: 17410

Barth’s Commentary on Romans, published in 1919, drew out of Paul the theme which had successively transfixed Augustine of Hippo, Luther and Calvin: humanity, its reason utterly fallen, could only reach God through divine grace mediated in Jesus Christ. loc: 17418

among those junior clergy seized by Barth’s critique of liberalism was one of Harnack’s own students in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.56…Spurred by the apparent growth of the German Christians after Hitler’s seizure of power, the dissidents made common cause in 1933-4 to form a ‘Confessing Church’. loc: 17425

Virtually all members also continued to feel it their duty to support the lawfully elected German government. loc: 17437

as Europe fell into general war in 1939, very many Christians both Protestant and Catholic found it all too easy to fall into complicity with Nazism. loc: 17449

Just as difficult to excuse were the regimes emerging in the wake of Hitler’s conquests which combined fervent religious commitment with enthusiasm for their own scaled-down version of Hitler’s murderous racism.…the Slovakian puppet regime he installed was led between 1939 and 1945 by Monsignor Jozef Tiso, who continued to act as a Catholic parish priest during his presidency, and was responsible for implementing deportations of Jews and Roma (gypsies) at Nazi bidding.…Croatia, Ante Pavelić ran a self-consciously Catholic regime, devoted to ridding a multi-ethnic state of Jews, Roma and Orthodox Serbs loc: 17464

protest demanding public condemnation from the Pope; it reached the Vatican in 1942 and had no public result.62 loc: 17469

The toxic effect of Nazi occupation was to set Pole against only recently self-identified Ukrainian, with the bizarre effect that Greek Catholic Ukrainians allied with Orthodox Ukrainians against the Roman Catholic Poles who shared Greek Catholics’ allegiance to Rome - thus overturning the alignments and antipathies of the previous three centuries.…around seventy thousand Poles died throughout the Ukraine in this violence, loc: 17478

Third French Republic was swiftly dismantled and its secularist appeal to the values of 1789 was cast into discredit.…Pétain, chose to cast his vigorous conservatism around an ideology of Catholic traditionalism, despite his own lack of any great devotional fervour. The official Church was delighted to back the loc: 17483

Pope Pius XII.…he was silent to the German government when he learned of an army plot to assassinate Hitler in late 1939,…as the Holocaust unfolded, he was silent also about the Jews. loc: 17498

Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galician Ukraine…personally sheltering Jews against deportation and setting up networks to hide them.…As the Nazis first recruited Ukrainians to murder Jews and then encouraged them to murder Poles,…writing personally to Heinrich Himmler, pleading with him not to call up Ukrainian policemen.…his memory sustained Greek Catholics through half a century more of misfortune and repression.66 loc: 17516

the Nazi extermination machine enrolled countless thousands of European Christians as facilitators or uncomplaining bystanders of its industrialized killings of Jews, it could succeed in co-opting them in the work of dehumanizing the victims because the collaborators had absorbed eighteen centuries of Christian negative stereotypes of Judaism loc: 17523

Dietrich Bonhoeffer.…execution just before the end of the war gave German Lutherans a martyr, when so many others had not been.…production of theological works a series of fragments and letters which contained phrases still echoing round Western Christian ears, loc: 17540

it is difficult to see how, without the boost to Soviet prestige provided by the repelling of Nazi armies in what Russians rightly term the Great Patriotic War, Soviet Russia could otherwise have staggered on as late as the 1980s, devoid as it was of any popular legitimacy loc: 17557

that same patriotic war effort saved the Russian Orthodox Church from institutional extinction, although not from a great deal of moral compromise.…Stalin realized that he was better served by a subservient Orthodox leadership which would have some credibility with other worldwide Christian leaders. loc: 17570

As Soviet armies inexorably followed up the Western Allies’ uncomfortable acceptance that Stalin would make Eastern Europe a Soviet sphere of influence, the various national Orthodox Churches apart from Greece followed the Moscow Patriarchate into an unhappy combination of collaboration and persecution at the hands of Communist satellite regimes. loc: 17576

WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: ECUMENICAL BEGINNINGS loc: 17579

[Colonies of the European empires wondered] what benefits they might now gain from their part in a war created originally in Europe. loc: 17588

Marshall Plan began the financing of a recovery programme for Europe which undoubtedly saved the European peoples from falling into new frustration, nihilism or willingness to listen to demagogues, loc: 17591

a moment comparable to the results of the devastation of Eastern Christianity in fourteenth-century Asia by plague, Mongol destructiveness and Islamic advance (see loc: 17594

Orthodoxy was weaker than at any stage in its existence, loc: 17597

Western Christianity in its Protestant and Catholic forms was flourishing more in America, Africa and Asia than in Europe. loc: 17597

as Europe painfully pulled away from its nadir, its churchgoing benefited for more than a decade from the weary desire to find some normality and decency after the nightmare. loc: 17598

Pius’s own conservative instincts mirrored Europe’s widespread longing to find comfort in the past. In 1950 he used papal infallibility to define the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, a move which infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike, and which did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine’s lack of justification in the Bible loc: 17608

Protestantism had developed in two different new directions which themselves had increasingly little to do with each other: on the one hand, there was a self-consciously liberal exploration of faith and social activism, and on the other, a host of newly founded Churches, many of which identified themselves as Pentecostal, and whose congregations expressed themselves in full-blooded extrovert Evangelical style. loc: 17618

Liberals showed plenty of enthusiasm for missionary activism, but this increasingly included an emphasis on justice and equality in the world, as a necessary reflection of the Christian message - what in North America was commonly called a ‘Social Gospel’. loc: 17629

During the twentieth century, liberal Protestantism embarked on a new adventure in Christian reunion. It elaborated a new effort to break down Church boundaries and heal the various breaches stemming from the Reformation.…echoing the title which the Patriarch of Constantinople had long fostered for himself: ‘Ecumenical’.77 loc: 17636

particular spur had been the puzzle of India:…leading organizer in the Ecumenical Movement for the first half of the twentieth century, J. H. Oldham,…began to see missionary activity as ministry not just to individual bodies but to society as a whole. Missionaries must share the good news through effective (and Western) medicine, rigorous (and Western) education and Western-style progress towards the elimination of racial discrimination or colonial exploitation. loc: 17647

Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, the largest and most comprehensive such gathering so far held.…recognition that it was no longer possible for Churches to work apart in spreading a message of unity and love; loc: 17667

Charles Brent…discussions and conferences which would consider issues of ‘Faith and Order’ - that is, what the Church believed and how it structured itself. This would help to clarify its mission in new settings, but it would have the potential to produce a coherent reaction to all that the Enlightenment had meant for Christian self-understanding, loc: 17672

Swedish Lutheran Primate, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom,…the other challenge facing the Churches in this age of dislocation and anxiety: the exploration of credible guidelines for being a Christian in modern society. loc: 17676

two movements eventually amalgamated in 1948 into the World Council of Churches, loc: 17679

Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the United Nations proclaimed in 1948 was the product of the same ecumenical liberal Protestant nexus of clerics and laypeople loc: 17682

1920 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops,…an Appeal to all Christian People to seek ‘a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all Truth, and gathering into its fellowship all “who profess and call themselves Christians,” within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common’.85 loc: 17689

little headway in the face of a constantly confused Anglican reaction to their overtures. Anglicans were always fatally divided between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals who could not agree on what was important about being an Anglican, loc: 17692

Bishop of Bombay (the modern Mumbai), won the confidence of non-episcopal Church leaders in south India. He proposed a Church which would possess the historic episcopate in succession from the Apostles, but which would take seriously decision-making by the whole body of the Church in presbyteries or synods and local congregations, and which would recognize the validity of the various ministries which came to it from Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians.88 loc: 17713

Eventually in 1955 the Church of England agreed to enter (almost) full communion with the new episcopal Church of South India, which had come to fruition eight years before. loc: 17724

WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: PENTECOSTALS AND NEW CHURCHES loc: 17731

Pentecostal disagreements trivial to observers, momentous to participants, threw long shadows over the future. loc: 17748

devotional enthusiasm led to an assertion by the Canadian preacher Robert McAlister that early Christians had baptized not in the name of the Trinity, but in the name of Jesus.…McAlister developed the proposition that ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ were only titles for the God who was named Jesus. This was a new form of that early Christian assertion of oneness in the Godhead, modalist Monarchianism loc: 17754

Schism followed in the only recently formed Assemblies of God, and the ‘Oneness’ folk went their own way, preserving a commitment to racial inclusiveness…‘Oneness’ Pentecostalism still flourishes; it may represent about a quarter of avowedly Pentecostal Churches worldwide.92 loc: 17758

In Pentecostalism’s early years, Pentecostals met with extreme detestation and name-calling from more established conservative Evangelicals, perhaps all the more so because Pentecostalism’s rhetorical style was unmistakably familiar. Like Evangelicalism, it combined a suspicion of modern city ways with a relish for capturing modernity from Satan. loc: 17762

there was much in it which was not a natural partner for biblically based Protestantism, particularly for Protestants who looked to the Five ‘Fundamentals’: verbal inerrancy, Jesus Christ’s divinity, the Virgin Birth, penal substitution and the physical resurrection of Christ.…Pentecostalism was inclined to look instead for ‘new revelation’: it was intuitive, spontaneous, whereas conservative Evangelicalism was rationalist, word-based. loc: 17770

In the American heartland, as years of catastrophic economic depression painfully inched towards recovery at the end of the 1930s, there developed a form of Pentecostalism referring to itself as the ‘Word of Faith’ movement. Like some earlier American denominations, it stressed the importance of prayer in healing, but there was much more to its vision of Christian success than that, causing detractors to refer to it as the ‘health and wealth’ movement, or the ‘Prosperity Gospel’.…capitalism in the service of Jesus, a ‘cargo cult’ rebranded for the American Dream.…many corners of the world would take up this message, so especially appealing to communities whose trajectory from poverty to prosperity seemed to vindicate the prayers they were making. loc: 17782

new umbrella organization for American conservative Evangelicalism, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose avowed goal was to fight Protestant liberalism and the Ecumenical Movement. loc: 17787

The association was a welcome reinforcement for Evangelical values at an unpromising moment. During the previous decades, conservative Evangelicals’ assumption that their cultural outlook was part of the hegemony of Protestantism in mainstream America had received two serious blows, over the issues of evolutionary biology and Prohibition. loc: 17791

hatred of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that caused the first debacle.… [Darrow] made the grand old man [Bryan] look foolish:…It was all a gift for humorists, and laughter is never good news for those seeking to impose the authority of the Word of God on others. loc: 17805

the cleavage grew between liberal Protestants and conservative Evangelicals, the Anti-Saloon League established in 1895, eventual victors in the campaign for the Amendment, seemed more and more the voice of angry small-town Evangelical America: suspicious alike of the big coastal cities and wicked old drink-sodden Europe,…cause of much human tragedy, providing a perfect opportunity for organized crime and its corruption of otherwise law-abiding society.…rerun of Cromwellian England’s bitter divisions over social regulation loc: 17819

for half a century conservative Evangelicals were too cowed by the fiasco of Prohibition to try to impose their social values on the rest of the nation by political means. loc: 17821

around the world innumerable offshoots of enthusiastic Protestantisms found their own life and style. By no means all observed the Pentecostal shibboleth of speaking in tongues, though they were certainly charismatic in their own fashion. loc: 17829

Africa bred a host of prophets…major spur to their message was the great influenza epidemic which swept the world in 1918,…much-vaunted Western medicine seemed helpless in face of it.…offered their own style of healing. loc: 17834

pride in an ‘Ethiopian’ faith, something truly African, runs through the crowded assembly of prophets across the continent. loc: 17840

growth over the twentieth century was phenomenal, far outstripping that of the population. loc: 17857

whereas in the nineteenth century African Christianity had largely been a youth movement, in the twentieth it was a women’s movement. Healing, that particular concern for women as they cared for their families, has become the great symbol of Christian success alongside education.102 loc: 17859

Asia was to produce Christianity’s most spectacular recent success story,…Korea,…southern Republic its own mixture of old-established Churches, Pentecostals and indigenous syncretism, which arose alongside the painful rebuilding of Korean society from wartime destitution. loc: 17875

As the 1950s reached their end, it would not have been unreasonable for Christian leaders to feel optimism about the future of their faith loc: 17881

Topic: Chapter 25 Culture Wars (1960-Present)

25 Culture Wars (1960-Present) loc: 17891

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL: HALF A REVOLUTION loc: 17893

Although John XXIII enjoyed one of the shorter pontificates in the papacy’s history, it had a transformative effect on Christianity far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church. loc: 17900

1959 he threw everything open to discussion by announcing his intention of calling a new council to the Vatican.2…unprecedented gathering of Catholic leaders listened with fascination to a pope who in his inaugural address spoke excitedly of the providential guidance of the world’s inhabitants to ‘a new order of human relationships’, and, far from lecturing the world, criticized those ‘prophets of misfortune’ who viewed it as ‘nothing but betrayal and ruination’.…More remarkable still were invitations to and the palpable presence of Protestant observers, loc: 17933

All the defensive draft documents so carefully prepared by the Curia were rejected and replaced with completely different texts. Two crucial agreed documents have remained central to the council’s legacy - loc: 17936

The first, Lumen Gentium (‘The Light of Peoples’), was a decree on the nature of the Church.…significant break with previous Roman Catholic statements in its careful choice of a verb: instead of a simple identification between the Church of Christ and the Church presided over by the pope, it stated that the Church ‘subsisted in’ the Roman Catholic Church. What did that say about other Churches - indeed, how does ‘subsist in’ differ from ‘is’?…decree also made a fresh attempt to tackle that question of authority which had nearly destroyed Trent, loc: 17945

second chapter was entitled ‘The People of God’, all of whom, according to the Book of Revelation, Christ the High Priest had made ‘a kingdom, priests, to his God and Father’…decree added the concept of ‘collegiality’ to papal primacy: a reaffirmation of the authority of other bishops alongside that of the Bishop of Rome loc: 17949

Then came Gaudium et Spes (‘Joy and Hope’), an attempt to place the Church in the context of the modern world:…The whole statement breathed the happy confidence, already expressed in Pope John’s opening address, that the Church need not fear opening discussions with those outside its boundaries, rather than lecturing them.…the value of vernacular liturgy, an adventurous engagement with the previous two centuries of biblical scholarship, an openness to ecumenism, an affirmation of the ministry of laypeople. loc: 17964

also open apology to the Jewish people for their sufferings at the hands of Christians in Nostra aetate (‘In our age’), which in its final draft bluntly dismissed the traditional Christian idea that the Jewish people had committed deicide - the killing of God. loc: 17965

One bishop amidst the crowds who found the whole proceedings thoroughly uncongenial and dismayingly chaotic,…Karol Wojtyła.…Josef Ratzinger.9 loc: 17970

swift election of Cardinal Montini as Pope Paul VI…determined to maintain the pace of change, but as he pressed on with the reforms, and later conscientiously implemented them,…now agonized about how far change should go. loc: 17977

council’s vote on the conservative proposal to consecrate the world to Mary was the most contentious and closely fought of any major decision within it.…move was not calculated to win over Protestants or even necessarily the Orthodox.11 loc: 17986

wide expectation among those present that realities revealed by mission in Africa and provoked by ecumenical contacts elsewhere would lead to a relaxation of the Roman Church’s insistence on universal celibacy for the clergy; instead Paul reaffirmed the celibacy rule.…the beginning of a steady decline in vocations to the priesthood in the northern hemisphere, loc: 17991

Throughout much of the rest of the world, in cultures where celibacy had never been valued, the papal rulings on this matter were frankly ignored, and in these settings, significantly, vocations continued to flourish.…unmodified stand against artificial birth control:…A commission of experts on natural law - including laypeople, even women - was about to publish a report on birth control after five years of deliberations, concluding that there was no good argument for banning contraceptive devices.…the Pope finally ignored the work and issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical Humanae vitae (‘Of Human life’), which gave no place for artificial contraception in Catholic family life.13…first time that the Catholic faithful have ever so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure their lives. loc: 18016

agreement with the Oecumenical Patriarch in 1965 to end the excommunications mutually proclaimed by East and West in 1054 loc: 18019

nothing in the life of the Church was so universally disruptive as the changes made to public worship.…council’s wish to stress the priesthood of all people in active participation in worship,…Overnight, the Tridentine rite of the Mass was virtually banned (with carefully hedged-around exceptions), and its Latin replacement was used almost universally in vernacular translations.…decision to reposition the celebrant at Mass facing the people:…emphasis on celebrating congregational Masses at a single main altar left the greater galaxy of side altars dusty and neglected.…requirement was for congregations to perform music in their own language.…acoustic guitar became the dictator of musical style in Catholicism, loc: 18042

slow gathering of fury among traditionalist Catholics, which in some places led to schism. loc: 18046

CATHOLICS, PROTESTANTS AND LIBERATION loc: 18049

huge shift in the membership of global Catholicism from north to south transformed the priorities loc: 18051

fight against sheer wretched poverty in the lives of millions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.…certain theologians, especially those working closely with the poor, began considering the implications of the Christian doctrine of Providence: the Father cares for humans as much as he clothes the lilies of the field.17…liberation theology.18…Gustavo Gutiérrez. He later popularized a phrase…‘preferential option for the poor’ in the Church’s construction of its mission.…redistribution of world resources which would give ‘preference to the poorest and most needy’.19 loc: 18070

Gutiérrez employed a phrase for purposeful action guided by theory, praxis.…Greek term for structured activity by free men,…declared material poverty as a ‘subhuman situation’ and ‘scandalous condition’, loc: 18078

Protestants in the United States turned a century of black struggle for equal political rights into an interracial campaign to make a reality of the civil war emancipation of enslaved African-Americans. loc: 18081

[Martin Luther Kings most successful actions:]pair of marches through Alabama from Selma to the state capital Montgomery in 1965.…In the first, hundreds of marchers, hastily gathered through Sunday sermons from King and his colleagues after the murder of a civil rights worker, were brutally attacked and tear-gassed by state police - fatally for the credibility of Southern government, in full view of television cameras.…When King called a new march for two days later to commemorate the brutality, clergy of all denominations from across the nation, and representatives of faith beyond Christianity, poured into Selma.…most remarkable demonstrations of ecumenism and multi-faith action against injustice loc: 18099

King’s enemies ruined their cause that same night by their street murder of a Unitarian minister…President Johnson - wily old Texan politician shocked into uncharacteristic moral indignation - spoke to Congress to back the Voting Rights Act, loc: 18103

development in the 1970s of a different variety of Protestant liberation theology: the minjung theology of South Korea.…Jesus was minjung and the friend of the minjung, teaching forgiveness and love of enemies, but Moses was also minjung, political leader of his people against oppression.…complex struggle not only with the authoritarian South Korean government, but with the global strategies of the United States, which maintained that regime. loc: 18114

For at the heart of all these movements was a meditation on the powerlessness of the crucified Christ, and on the paradox that this powerlessness was the basis for resurrection: freedom and transformation.…Against the background of power struggles which had laid empires low and ruined so many lives in two world wars and beyond, much Christian experience thus resonated with the themes of crucified weakness and the tiny scale of the mustard seed before it becomes a great tree. loc: 18133

rapid disintegration in the enormous colonial empires built up by European colonial powers in the nineteenth century…Rome had given so little consideration to providing an autonomous future for Catholicism…political authorities had shown no more forethought than the Church. This short-sightedness was the prelude to immeasurable human misery loc: 18149

extraordinary variety of African-initiated Christian practice which made Christianity even beyond its ancient north-eastern African heartlands at least as indigenous a religion as the great alternative, Islam. loc: 18161

Artificially created chunks of colonial territory had been set up with democratic forms, civil services and judiciaries.…They rarely functioned effectively in Africa, and the generation of liberation politicians who became rulers at independence frequently succumbed to the corruption of power.…People let down by government turned to the Churches for their welfare, self-expression and a chance to exercise control over their own lives. loc: 18166

Afrikaners were proud of more than two centuries of struggle to establish themselves in a wilderness, buoyed up by a militant Reformed Protestantism which told them that God had delivered them this land, and determined to resist any extension of power to non-whites,…Afrikaners turned their military defeat by the British in the second Boer War (1899-1902) into a gradual rebuilding of Afrikaner ascendancy,…turned this de facto situation into a system with its own crazy and cruel logic, known by the Afrikaans word apartheid, separateness.…At the heart of apartheid was a great act of theft from the Churches: the entire mass-education system which they had built up from primary level to higher education, loc: 18179

Anglicans led the Churches’ resistance, and had the capacity from time to time to intimidate the ostentatiously Christian Nationalist regime -…its role in the liberation struggle in South Africa should perhaps give it most pride. loc: 18194

A CULTURAL REVOLUTION FROM THE SIXTIES loc: 18247

phenomenon which began by affecting European liberal Protestantism, but which quickly spread throughout all the Churches of Western Europe, and beyond them, into their cognates in Canada and European-origin Australasia: steep falls in the number of those actively involved in corporate religious practice. The process was labelled ‘secularization’ loc: 18251

Clearly people were opting for the nuclear family; but this was not just a traditional Christian family. It put a great deal more emphasis on emotional and sexual fulfilment, and traditional male superiority was eroded in favour of a ‘companionate’ partnership of equals,…Fewer children exercised proportionately more emotional power; it has been said that the post-war American family has been increasingly run by and for the benefit of children. loc: 18268

that mainstay of Protestant Church practice from the eighteenth century, the children’s Sunday School, melted away. In 1900, 55 per cent of British children attended Sunday School; the figure was still 24 per cent in 1960, but 9 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 2000.40…‘Companionate’ marriage created high expectations which were all too frequently disappointed.…possibility of divorce was introduced into the law codes of Catholic countries where it had previously been outlawed loc: 18285

Elite liberal English Protestants, chiefly Anglicans, were at the forefront of a hard-fought struggle, way in advance of popular opinion, which led eventually to the limited decriminalization of male same-sex activity in 1967. loc: 18295

What liberal English Christians were seeking to do was actively to separate the law of the land from Christian moral prescriptions.…liberate the Church in its divine mission by disentangling it from official power structures.44 loc: 18302

Bonhoeffer anticipated themes of liberation theology such as the suffering God and the transformed Church, but with a different thrust, in seeing humanity as ‘coming of age’: ‘God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him . . . God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross.’…offered his own prophecy of hope and affirmation to Christianity cut loose from its practice of religion: ‘The day will come when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change and renew the world. loc: 18311

there gathered strength a movement to open the ordained ministry of Churches to women, loc: 18332

OLD-TIME RELIGION: AFFIRMATIONS loc: 18345

Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism. loc: 18352

It has been observed by sociologists of religion that the most extreme forms of conservatism to be found in modern world religions, conservatisms which in a borrowing from Christianity have been termed ‘fundamentalism’, are especially attractive to ‘literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity’ - in other words, those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose.51 loc: 18356

Already two legal judgements had infuriated Evangelical voters: the banning of school prayer in America’s public schools in 1962, the result of the courts trying to enforce the principle of the American constitutional separation of Church and State, and the Roe v. Wade judgement effectively legalizing abortion in 1973. loc: 18369

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. It was the same longing to bring on the Last Days…derived its particular premillennialist roots from the Millerites and the dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby.54 loc: 18394

American foreign policy has for decades seemed locked into hardly questioning its support for the State of Israel, even though the consequences for its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and with others, are almost entirely negative.55 They have been particularly dire for the traditional Christianities of the Middle East.…Christian communities are generally in steep decline in numbers through the region, and Israel/Palestine in particular. Caught between the animosities of a politics which has other concerns, Christians have every incentive to leave, whenever they can, for exile in less dangerous lands, ending a connection with homelands which goes directly back to the first generations of the followers of Christ. It is easy for them to feel abandoned and betrayed by the Christian-based cultures of the West.56 loc: 18404

It has been common for those expecting the imminent Last Days to deny the reality of global climate change or its connection with human agency. In any case, given the imminent reign of Christ, attempts to fortify humanity against such signs of the times would be pointless, not to say disrespectful to God loc: 18417

John Paul’s election was a catalyst for a renewed joyful self-confidence in the Polish Catholic Church,…His insistence on returning to his native country in 1979, made possible by a fatal irresolution in the Polish government, remains a moment to savour in the history of resistance to oppression as ecstatic crowds, up to a third of the population, met him in an outpouring of self-expression.…Without that visit, the formation of the Solidarity movement and the process which within a decade led to a peaceful establishment of real democracy in Poland, and indeed throughout Eastern Europe, could not have happened. loc: 18439

John Paul II had a liking for the word ‘magisterium’, which, though not in the repertoire of biblical writers, had since the nineteenth century stealthily acquired a technical theological meaning as ‘authoritative teaching’,…The Pope was determined to teach Catholics what Catholicism was about, and was also determined to stop anyone else telling them something different. loc: 18455

Pope’s instinctive anti-Communism made him react with hostility towards liberation theology, loc: 18460

Behind the long papacy of John Paul II was a programme which could never be made too explicit: to reverse a raft of changes launched by Vatican II. loc: 18473

theological stock of Hans Urs von Balthasar rose considerably during the Wojtyła papacy. Von Balthasar was an interestingly creative philosophical theologian, deeply sensitive to music, art and literature, a Swiss prepared to confront the prevailing liberalism of Swiss Catholicism…long-term asset was his coldness towards Vatican II, loc: 18490

Pope John Paul had no time for Vatican II’s discussion of collegiality in the episcopate. He sought to centralize appointments of bishops with a thoroughness which has no parallel in Catholic history, and which was often explicitly designed to override the wishes of the local diocese. loc: 18497

The aspect of the cultural revolution of the 1960s which remained most troublesome for the Pope was the new openness in sexual mores and questioning of traditional gender roles. He gave the whole package of attitudes the striking blanket label ‘a culture of death’;…hatred of abortion,…opposed the death penalty…Prominent in the culture of death for the Pope was artificial contraception. loc: 18514

one of the most painful issues in sexuality, the sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy.…For the world to discover how widespread this had been over the span of living memory was bad enough; what was much worse was the exposure of the Church’s history of cover-up and callous treatment of those who complained, loc: 18518

Particularly damaging was Pope John Paul’s consistent support for an ultra-conservative Catholic activist organization, the Legion of Christ,…Persistent accusations of sexual abuse against its founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado, loc: 18525

FREEDOM: PROSPECTS AND FEARS loc: 18533

At the centre of the implosion of Soviet-era Communism, another religious anniversary provided the opportunity for the revival of Russian Orthodoxy.…church buildings were reopened, religious education and religious publishing permitted once more. loc: 18569

Patriarch Aleksii II. Born in the Baltic republic of Estonia but with a Russian mother, Aleksii brought a new energy to the patriarchate, yet his instincts in renewing the life of the Church were to return it to a selective vision of the past. He scorned the ecumenism which his Church had been tentatively exploring at the beginning of the twentieth century. loc: 18573

1993 constitution of the Russian Federation; it now recognized ‘the special contribution of Orthodoxy to the history of Russia and to the establishment and development of Russia’s spirituality and culture’. loc: 18597

In theology and social statements, the Moscow Patriarchate has likewise followed a conservative line. loc: 18608

A similar spirit of conservative and anti-Western nationalism has continued in the Serbian Orthodox Church. loc: 18618

easy for unscrupulous demagogic politicians quitting Communism and seeking a new framework for power to draw on the more poisonous elements in the Serb past: the bitter memories of recent Serbian sufferings at the hands of Pavelić’s Croatian (and Catholic) quasi-Fascists, an extremely selective reading of past Serb relations with the Ottoman Empire, loc: 18634

In 1900, the Orthodox were estimated as 21 per cent of the world’s Christians; that had declined to 11 per cent at the beginning of the twenty-first century, while the Roman Catholic proportion, thanks to its growth in the south of the globe, had risen from 48 per cent to 52 per cent.90 loc: 18647

From the 1970s, both Mount Athos and the Coptic monasteries of Egypt have seen a sudden and unexpected revival, bringing new recruits and new hope, albeit sometimes accompanied by an ultra-traditional attitude to the modern world. loc: 18660

In 1991 President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, member of a Pentecostal Church and elected freely and fairly to power on a programme of reform, became the first ruler of a post-colonial African state to declare his country ‘a Christian nation’, submitting ‘the Government and the entire nation of Zambia to the Lordship of Jesus Christ’. loc: 18678

Asked in 2002 what legacy he might give to China, the Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin is reported as saying that he would propose Christianity as China’s official religion.…in China and India the combined number of hidden Christians had reached an estimated 120 million, around 6 per cent of the world’s total population, loc: 18689

Jerzy Popiełusko,…‘An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.’99 loc: 18703

powerhouse of this movement [Evangelism of the Anglican Church] is the Australian Anglican Diocese of Sydney,…altering the direction of worldwide Anglicanism towards what it might have become in a more radical sixteenth-century English Reformation, combined somewhat anachronistically with a campaigning style of evangelism borrowed from American revivalism.…campaigning network throughout Anglicanism which has made no secret of its inclination to end the role of Lambeth Palace at the centre of the Anglican Communion.101 loc: 18726

The causes célèbres uniting Anglican conservatives around the world have been two choices of openly gay men as bishops. loc: 18729

Sexual morality has been a good issue for conservatives to rally round, since it is about the only thing on which all can agree loc: 18731

vehement statements from Archbishop Desmond Tutu that the acceptance of the moral integrity of same-sex relationships is ‘a matter of ordinary justice’.102 loc: 18735

debate about whether God’s plan for the world centres on the supremacy of heterosexual men. loc: 18738

[Point of contention with Orthodox churches is] arrival through the newly open borders of a vast number of American evangelists, thirsting to spread Evangelical Christianity with the same enthusiasm that other Americans brought venture capitalism at the same time. loc: 18753

huge expansion of Pentecostalism in Latin America. loc: 18755

The alliance of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which was extremely shaky from the first days of Pentecostalism until the 1940s (see pp. 960-61), may not be a permanent one. There is no special reason why a form of Christianity which emphasizes the renewal brought by the gifts of the Spirit should be allied to Evangelical Fundamentalism, which demands adherence to a particular set of intellectual or doctrinal propositions or a particular way of understanding texts from the past.…Pentecostalism might grow into an alliance with other forms of Christianity which have seen the Bible in more flexible and arguably more creative ways loc: 18770

certain aspects of the Christian past are being jettisoned without fuss even within self-consciously traditional religion. The most notable casualty of the past century has been Hell.…The disappearance of Hell represents a quiet Christian acceptance of propositions whose first prominent appearance was in nineteenth-century English Protestantism. loc: 18788

F. D. Maurice,…1853…a series of theological essays which suggested that the notion of eternal punishment was a misunderstanding of the biblical message. loc: 18790

abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days, inhumation of corpses.…one of the earliest public manifestations of the Christian Church was as a burial club loc: 18799

the liturgical transformation involved is huge,…The theological implications are also profound. Death is not so much distanced as sanitized or domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society. The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.110 loc: 18815

It is one of the curiosities of Western society since the Enlightenment that much of its greatest sacred music (though by no means all) has been the work of those who have abandoned any structured Christian faith. loc: 18829

‘music is not concerned with the depiction of forms in space. It is, as it were, outside space.’112 Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas and a host of mystics in East and West would have said the same about God, and God himself said it about himself, in the midst of a burning bush on the Sinai peninsula. Perhaps music might be one way past the impasse which has been the experience of some versions of the Protestant Reformation, loc: 18844

‘Nothing has ever borne fruit in the Church without emerging from the darkness of a long period of loneliness into the light of the community.’115 loc: 18860

in 2009 it has more than two billion adherents, almost four times its numbers in 1900, a third of the world’s population, and more than half a billion more than its current nearest rival, Islam.116 loc: 18863

more interesting conundrum for Christianity is a society in which polite indifference has replaced the battles of the twentieth century:…Does secularism have to be an enemy of Christian faith, loc: 18868

Original sin is one of the more plausible concepts within the Western Christian package, corresponding all too accurately to everyday human experience. One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder. loc: 18870

Even those who see the Christian story as just that - a series of stories - may find sanity in the experience of wonder: the ability to listen and contemplate. loc: 18872