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The Medieval Church
The Medieval Church: A Brief History argues for the pervasiveness of the Church in every aspect of life in medieval Europe. It shows how the institution of the Church attempted to control the lives and behaviour of medieval people, for example, through canon law, while at the same time being influenced by popular movements like the friars and heresy.
This fully updated and illustrated second edition offers a new introductory chapter on ‘the basics of Christianity’, for students who might be unfamiliar with this territory. The book now has new material on some of the key individuals in Church history - Benedict of Nursia, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi - as well as a more comprehensive study throughout of the role of women in the medieval Church.
Lynch and Adamo seek to explain the history of the Church as an institution, and to explore its all-pervasive role in medieval life. In the course of the thousand years covered in this book, we see the members and leaders of the western Church struggle with questions that are still relevant today: What is the nature of God? How does a Church keep beliefs from becoming diluted in a diverse society? What role should the state play in religion?
The book is now accompanied by a website (www.routledge.com/cw/lynch) with textual, visual and musical primary sources making it a fantastic resource for students of medieval history.
Joseph H. Lynch earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971. He was the Joe & Elizabeth Engle Chair in the History of Christianity at The Ohio State University, where he taught from 1976 until 2008. Throughout his career, he earned many teaching awards, held numerous distinguished fellowships, and authored several books on Church history.
Phillip C. Adamo studied medieval history under Joseph Lynch at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in 2000. Adamo is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. In 2006, he was awarded Augsburg’s Teaching Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning.
Preface to the first edition
Christianity is a religion in which historical events (or what are believed to be historical events) are important. One source of that conviction was the Old Testament, which told of God’s dealings with humanity and with his chosen people, the Jews. A second source was the deeply held conviction, which Catholic Christians defended against Gnostic Christians, that Jesus had really been born of a woman, had really lived as a human being, had really died on a cross and had really risen from the dead. From the first generation, Christians understood themselves in a historical way. The presentation of Jesus’s life and teachings was not in philosophical treatises (as it might well have been) but in narratives - the gospels - that included place, time, circumstances and other elements of history.
The history of the movement that claimed Jesus as its founder - church history proper - was already being written in the late first century with Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke had no immediate successors. No church writer in the second or third century composed a history in the strict sense of that term, but many of them recorded historical details, including the successions of bishops, the disputes within the group over belief, the spread of their religion and the persecutions by the Roman authorities. Church history received its first full expression in the Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260-339), who was aware that he was a pioneer in his effort to record the historical growth of the church.’
Eusebius had several successors in the fourth and fifth centuries, including Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Evagrius, all of whom wrote in Greek.’ Between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries church histories of many kinds - those of monasteries, bishoprics, the papacy, religious orders - proliferated. Those historians did not think of themselves as living in what we classify as ‘the Middle Ages’. Usually, they thought they lived in the sixth and final age of human history, which was connected by God’s plan to earlier ages and was moving more or less rapidly toward the end of time.’
It was in the fifteenth century, when Renaissance humanists divided European history into three parts - ancient, middle and modern - that a history of the church in its middle or medieval age (media aetas) could be conceptualised. The humanists’ notion of a middle age was generally a negative one. They saw the media aetas as a period of darkness and barbarism separating them from their beloved Rome and Greece. The church of that barbaric age shared, in their view, in the crudeness and corruption of the times. The debate over the character of the church in the middle period grew hotter during the sixteenth century as Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and others quarrelled about the nature of the church and used historical arguments to support their respective views.
The study of the medieval church was born in the sixteenth century and has been an enterprise of huge proportions and long duration. It has always been and continues to be a multilingual pursuit: the main language of intellectual life and religion in the medieval west was Latin and that of the Christian east was Greek. Modern scholarship of high quality is produced in virtually every European language and some non-European languages as well. In an annual bibliography published by the Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique, there has been an average of 7,524 entries for the last five years, about 40 per cent of which touch on the medieval church.
In view of the mountains of sources and modern scholarship, it may be thought presumptuous to write a history of the medieval church in a single medium-sized volume. The chief justification I can offer is that I have experienced the need for such a work in my own teaching. Also, Iam often asked by interested people for something both reliable and manageable to read on the medieval church. This book is intended to be an introduction for beginners and, to be frank, beginners with neither Latin nor extensive knowledge of modern foreign languages. With considerable regret, I have purposely restricted footnotes and suggested reading almost entirely to works in English, since I wanted to provide interested students with sources and secondary works that they could read with profit. In almost every instance, I chose to cite works that would be useful to a beginner who wished to pursue a particular topic. If students were to read what I included in the ‘Suggested Reading’ and in the notes, they would learn a great deal about the medieval church. Some readers will miss a more extensive treatment of eastern Christianity or of important historical figures. I understand their view, but I had to be selective in my choice of topics. I have concentrated on the western church and I have emphasised ideas and trends over personalities.
For readers who want different treatments of the history of the medieval church, there is no shortage of choices in all sorts of formats and approaches. I shall suggest only a few. Williston Walker, Richard Norris, David W. Lotz and Robert T. Handy, A History of the Christian Church, 4th edn (New York, 1985), cover the entire history of the church in about 750 densely printed pages, of which about 200 pages cover the Middle Ages. Generations of students have profited from Margaret Deanesly’s The Medieval Church, 590-1500, originally published in 1925 and reissued in a ninth edition, reprinted with corrections (London, 1972). David Knowles and Dimitri Obolensky, The Middle Ages, The Christian Centuries, 3 (London and New York, 1969) provide a chronological treatment with considerable attention to eastern Christianity. Bernard Hamilton, Religion in the Medieval West (London, 1986), approaches the subject topically. R. W. Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, The Pelican History of the Church, 3 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970) is partly chronological and partly topical in approach. Southern’s book is brilliant, but presupposes a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader.
The history of theology is not identical to the history of the church, but a knowledge of the history of theology is very useful to the student of church history. A detailed presentation of the history of ancient, western medieval and eastern medieval theology can be found in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago, IL, 1971); vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700) (Chicago, IL, 1974); vol. 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300) (Chicago, IL, 1978); and vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (Chicago, IL, 1981). For the very ambitious reader with French, there is Augustin Fliche and Victor Martin, Histoire de lEglise depuis les origines jusqu’a nos jours (1934- ) in 21 large volumes, of which vols 3 to 15 cover the medieval church. There is unfortunately no English translation of those volumes. The multivolume Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, edited by Hubert Jedin, has been translated into English as History of the Church, 10 vols, edited by Hubert Jedin and John Dolan (London, 1980-1). Vols 2 to 4 cover the Middle Ages.
The beginner sometimes needs a good reference work to fill in gaps and define terms. An excellent resource in about 1,500 pages is the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross, 2nd edn reprinted with corrections and edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1977). There are also numerous learned encyclopedias in many languages which can summarise a topic and lead the interested reader to the sources and modern treatments of it. Especially useful for English-speaking readers are the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols (New York, 1982-9) and the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols and 3 supplements (New York, 1967-87). One crucial way to deepen knowledge is to read original sources. A useful sample of the sources is translated in Marshall W. Baldwin, Christianity Through the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1970). Readings in Church History, vol. 1, edited by Colman Barry (Paramus, NJ, 1960), has a considerable number of translated sources from the first to the fifteenth centuries. Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd edn by Henry Bettenson (Oxford, 1963), pp. 1-182, has an important selection of ancient and medieval sources, with some attention to the history of theology. The Library of the Christian Classics, 26 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1953-66), has modern translations of many important ancient, medieval and early modern works touching on church history and theology. Unless otherwise noted, translations of sources in this book are my own. The longer biblical quotations are from The Jerusalem Bible, Reader’s Edition, copyright by Doubleday & Co. (Garden City, NY, 1968).
I have many people to thank for their advice and support. Some of the work on this book was completed in 1987-8 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Iam grateful to the Department of History and the College of Humanities at the Ohio State University, which have generously supported my work for many years. I want to thank Lawrence Duggan, John Van Engen and Thomas F. X. Noble for advice and helpful criticism. I am also grateful to the undergraduates and graduate students at the Ohio State University who have listened to - and critiqued - my lectures on the medieval church for almost twenty years. I want to thank the Longman Academic Department for the opportunity to write such a work. The choice of subjects, the interpretations - and the errors - are mine alone.
Joseph H. Lynch
Preface to the second edition
I first read Joe Lynch’s The Medieval Church: A Brief History in 1992, the year it was published. I was an undergraduate senior with an interest in medieval monks, and a professor of mine recommended the book, thinking that Lynch might be a good person for me to study under in graduate school. In 1993, I became Lynch’s student at The Ohio State University. After 37 years of teaching there Joe died in 2008. I was deeply saddened - as were all of his students, colleagues and friends. He had been a wonderful teacher and remained a supportive mentor.
In 2009, when I was asked to undertake the second edition of The Medieval Church, it was at once a great honour and an occasion for some terror. The book had been very successful since its first publication. It was popular with teachers and students, continued to have good sales, even after 17 years on the market, and had even been translated into Polish and Korean. How could I possibly revise a work that would live up to that!? Joe himself had been working on the second edition off and on for several years, but other scholarly projects and his untimely death kept him from finishing. Now it was on me to try to make a good book even better.
As it turned out, there was some room for improvement. At the very least, there had been almost two decades of new scholarship since the book’s first publication, so there was a fair amount of ‘updating’ to be done. Some of the topics in the book could also be broadened. As just one example, this new edition has much more on women in the medieval church, woven throughout the book. There is also a bit more coverage of the historiographic and scholarly debates concerning various topics. Lynch had a thorough listing of recommended readings, both in his preface and for each chapter at the end of the book. I have updated these lists with primary sources and secondary scholarship at the end of each chapter. A number of practical improvements make the book more accessible and (hopefully) more appealing to its intended audience, including images and better maps that are placed in the text (rather than being clumped at the back of the book). Finally, there is an online primary source reader, with texts chosen and edited specifically for The Medieval Church. References to these sources appear at the end of each chapter under the heading ‘Companion website’. Readers can go online as they are reading the history to see what the primary sources have to say.
Concerning footnotes: in the preface to the first edition, Lynch wrote ‘with considerable regret’, that he had ‘purposely restricted footnotes’. Yet in his preface for the second edition (not published here), he changed ‘restricted’ to ‘avoided’, with the same considerable regret. In drafts of chapters I inherited, it was clear that Lynch did not intend to have footnotes or endnotes. I struggled with this ‘restricting vs. avoiding’ issue of notes for some time. Lynch himself had trained me always to cite my sources and acknowledge the scholarship of others. What to do? In the end, I opted for endnotes, mostly restricted to direct quotations. Many of the footnotes in the first edition were more about further reading anyway, and these have been adapted into a ‘Suggested Reading’ section at the end of each chapter. In spite of the paucity of citations, this book is a synthesis based on the scholarly work of generations of historians. While the absence of footnotes may streamline the student’s reading experience, I hope the debt owed to those historians is adequately expressed in the ‘Suggested Reading’ section.
On the subject of debt, I have received a lot of support to make this book happen. First and foremost, I must thank Ann Lynch, Joe’s wife, and Daniel Hobbins, Joe’s colleague at OSU, who recommended me for the project. Thanks to the office for Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunities (URGO), the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Dean’s Office, and my colleagues at Augsburg College, especially John Harkness, Tim Jones, Martha Stortz and Han Wiesma, who read early drafts. Thanks to Elle Davis, Andrew Fox, Luke Mueller and Aidan Nancarrow, undergraduates at Augsburg, who helped in researching parts of the book and the companion website. Thanks also to the students of HIS 348, my course on the medieval church, for test-driving the early draft of this edition. Special thanks to the anonymous readers, who provided invaluable feedback. Thanks also to Laura Mothersole, Sarah May, and the team at Routledge. Also to Kathy Auger at Graphicraft, who ably oversaw the book’s production. Last but not least, my deep thanks to Mari Shullaw, my editor and a wonderful collaborator. Her best advice to me: ‘It’s not easy trying to revise the work of a much-loved mentor, but remember that the greatest tribute you can pay him is to trust your own judgment, even when it goes against him!’
I’ve tried to follow that advice. If the book has gotten better, it’s because Joe Lynch was its first author, and my teacher. Yet, by trusting my own judgement, I have also made his work my own. Any errors, therefore, are my own as well.
Publisher’s acknowledgements
The publisher would like to thank the following copyright holders for their kind permission to reproduce the images in this book: the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Princeton University Library; Pierpont Morgan Library; Biblioteca Capitolare; Kunst Historisches Museum; Musée de Picardie; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; Bibliothéque Nationale de France; the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo; Aachen Cathedral Treasury; Musée du Louvre; and the Staatliche Museen.
Whilst every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
The basics of Christianity
n spite of this chapter’s title, the ‘basics of Christianity’ were not and are not eternal and unchanging, at least not historically speaking. Christian believers, both medieval and modern, might claim otherwise, but there is a difference between belief in a doctrine of faith and what the historical narrative tells us. One is not necessarily better than the other; they are simply two different things. Our goal in this chapter is to introduce some basic concepts of historical Christianity as they developed in the medieval church, and to place those ‘basics’ in their historical context. Grasping these concepts will help the reader to understand what follows in the rest of this book. Whether these next few pages serve as review, or as a first introduction to Christianity, keep in mind as you read that historical Christianity developed and changed throughout the Middle Ages, and continued to change, subject to constant amendment by various groups of Christians up to the present day.
The ‘basics’ of Christianity include its doctrines on the creation of the universe, the creation and fall of humankind, Satan, the angels, heaven and hell, redemption, the incarnation of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the nature of Eve and Mary, and the Last Judgement.
|. The creation of the universe
Christianity borrows many of its doctrines from the Hebrew Scripture, what Christians call the Old Testament. According to the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis 1:1 (chapter 1, verse 1), ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. This idea seems simple enough, but the earliest Christian theologians questioned it. Did God create everything in the universe out of something else? Or was everything created out of nothing? Even in pre-Christian times, Greek and Jewish philosophers had struggled with the concept of creation. The Greek philosopher Plato (429-347 Bc) suggested that nothing comes into existence without a cause. He posited a ‘demiurge’ - from a Greek word meaning artisan or craftsman - who had not necessarily created everything out of nothing, but took what existed in a state of chaos and created order from it. Philo of Alexandria (20 Bc-aD 50), a Hellenistic Jew, saw Plato’s ‘first cause’ as the creator God in Genesis. The Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215) tried to keep the biblical idea of creation from initial chaos, citing the book of Wisdom 11:17: ‘Your all-powerful hand, which created the world out of formless matter.’ In the late second century, Theophilus of Antioch was arguably the first Christian thinker to deny the existence of the chaotic state of matter before creation, arguing instead that God had created the universe ex nibilo, from a Latin phrase meaning ‘out of nothing’. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) whose influence as a Christian writer spanned the Middle Ages and beyond - borrowed from these earlier thinkers and created a doctrine of creation that would have a long hold on the medieval church. Augustine supported the idea of creation ex nibilo, even claiming that God had created time itself, which meant that there was no such thing as ‘before creation’. God had always been. He summoned ex nihilo all that existed. He was not compelled to create the world, but the created world was still sustained by him for every instant of its existence.’ Augustine’s concept of creation stuck, and was even confirmed in 1215 by the church’s Fourth Lateran Council.
Il. The creation and fall of humankind
The book of Genesis goes on to include the origin of humans. This fascinating tale of creation - of the universe, of Adam and Eve - has been complicated by a learned tradition of explaining or even explaining away some of its stories. For example, there are two biblical accounts of creation (Gen. 1 and 2:1-4, and Gen. 2:5-23), which became harmonised into a single narrative. According to this narrative, God created the visible universe during six ‘days’, though Augustine and other early thinkers did not believe these could have been the 24-hour days experienced by humans. On the sixth day God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves.’ The first man, Adam, was created from dust and received life from God’s breath. He was placed in a wonderful garden, a paradise, where he had control over the rest of creation and enjoyed a sort of human perfection, free from suffering and death, though he was lonely since he was the only one of his kind. In response to his need, God created a companion, Eve, from Adam’s rib. The paradise of Adam and Eve, with its innocent nakedness and its freedom from pain, toil and hunger, was the image of human life as it could have been.
Genesis 3:1-21 explains why humans no longer live in a paradise, and why they must suffer and die. God had instructed Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, but, tempted by a serpent, they disobeyed God and ate the fruit. Because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve lost their health and immortality. Whether or not there had been sexual activity in paradise, there certainly was after the expulsion, and it was so shameful that Adam and Eve covered their nakedness, which had not troubled them before their sin of disobedience. Eve bore children in physical pain and Adam gained food by hard physical work. God expelled them from the garden and condemned them to suffer pain, hard work, death and the other ills that are so prominent in the lives of their descendants. The consequences of their sinful rebellion were summed up in the notion of a ‘Fall’ from God’s grace, which led theologians to develop two related doctrines: one on original sin, and one on free will.
According to the doctrine on original sin, when Adam lost his privileged status in paradise, this punishment was passed on to all of his descendants, meaning the entire family of humankind. In short, human life, with all its troubles, was the way it was because of the first parents’ sin of disobedience, which damaged all succeeding generations. Augustine was one of the main promoters of this doctrine, but he was opposed by a group of theologians collectively known as Pelagians. A monk named Pelagius (c.354-c.430) and his followers posited that the human descendants of Adam and Eve were not affected by original sin. They argued that even if Adam had not sinned, he still would have died, and that Adam’s sin only affected himself, not the whole human race. Augustine’s ideas won out, however, when the Councils of Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431) condemned the Pelagian teachings as heresy.
Connected to the doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of free will. If God is omniscient, then he must have known what decision Adam and Eve were going to make regarding the forbidden fruit. If that were true, then how freely did Adam and Eve make their decision? Were they simply predestined to act out some divine plan? If the latter is true, then how could Adam and Eve, and subsequent generations, be held accountable for their actions? Here again, Augustine was the theologian who exercised the greatest influence on this doctrine, though his writings can seem contradictory. He claimed that humans absolutely have free will, but also that God, because he is omnipotent, has power over human will. A theologian named Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) attempted to reconcile some of Augustine’s teachings. Concerning God’s omniscience - which would give him foreknowledge of all human actions - Aquinas argued that God existed outside of time, making past, present and future all equal in God’s view. God sees everything at once, in a single comprehensive act, like a person looking down from a high mountain at a traveller below, who can see the inevitable path the traveller will take, even though the traveller maintains her free will to make choices.
Ill. Satan, the angels, heaven and hell
In the events leading to the Fall of Adam, one of the indispensable players in the Christian story made his debut. Even though Adam and Eve had chosen to disobey, that was not the entire story of the world’s evils. The Christian tradition traces evil not only to human psychology and choice, but also to a person, a bitter enemy of humans: Satan (from a Hebrew word meaning ‘the adversary’), or the devil (from a Greek word meaning ‘the slanderer’). Satan had taken the form of a serpent in paradise. He had tempted Eve with the promise that eating the fruit of the forbidden tree would make her and Adam like gods, who could differentiate between good and evil.
Satan became a central character in the Christian understanding of the moral universe, yet his appearance in Genesis was abrupt and seemed to require an explanation. In fact, the name Satan does not appear in the book of Genesis (the first appearance of the name is in 1 Chronicles 21:1). Genesis simply describes a serpent; later theologians interpreted the serpent to be Satan. Out of other bits and pieces in the Bible, medieval theologians gradually accounted for Satan’s existence in the following way. In addition to the visible world, God had created an invisible world populated by spiritual beings, called seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels. These were eventually regarded as the nine choirs who sang God’s praises. Christian tradition has a great deal to say about the lowest spirit beings, the archangels and angels, because their activities were described in both the Old and New Testaments, where they appeared as messengers from God to human beings. Indeed, the Greek word for a messenger was angelos. A few of the angels had names known to humans (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael), but the overwhelming majority were anonymous. Before the creation of the visible world, some angels rebelled against God, led by a highly placed angel named Lucifer, which meant ‘the bearer of light’. The usual explanation for their sin was their pride and unwillingness to serve their creator. After a tremendous battle in heaven, the forces of loyal angels led by the archangel Michael defeated the rebels and cast them out. Thus there was a Fall in the heavenly realm that paralleled Adam’s Fall in the world of material creation. The defeated angels were transformed into devils and their leader Lucifer became Satan, the adversary of God and of humans.
Each kind of being - angel, human, devil - had its natural place in the created universe, with three interrelated zones to accommodate them, arranged like a three-storey building. The top floor was heaven, where God lived with the choirs of angels and holy, deceased human beings, known as saints. The middle floor was the earth, where humans lived. The lowest floor was hell, the underworld, where Satan, the devils, and the damned human beings lived. There was a constant flow of traffic between the middle zone and the other two. While this idea is supported biblically, over time, theologians also debated and developed doctrines concerning heaven and hell. For example, twelfth-century theologians reading Aristotle’s works on the make-up of the universe attempted to figure out where, exactly, heaven was located. They also developed doctrine on a place called purgatory - whose biblical roots are still a matter of debate - where sinners who were not quite bad enough to go to hell could purge their sins and eventually be admitted into heaven.
IV. The process of redemption
Even though Adam had sinned and been severely punished, God did not abandon humanity entirely. He planned to offer human beings a way back to his favour, though it would take centuries to work it out. God had a plan to reveal himself again to fallen humanity and to save at least some humans from their inherited sin. In the generations after Adam’s Fall, his descendants had gone from bad to worse. In Genesis 6:9-9:17, God sent a flood to destroy all but Noah, a just man, and his family. After the flood, God made a covenant, that is, an agreement, that he would never again destroy the natural world by flood. The symbol of God’s covenant with Noah was the rainbow. That covenant included all mankind, but the subsequent stages of God’s plan narrowed in on a specific people, the Israelites or Hebrews (known to later generations as the Jews), who were God’s ‘chosen people’.”
God subsequently made a covenant with Abraham, the father of the Israelites, in which he promised that he would be their God and they would be his special people, who would worship only him. He would give Abraham’s descendants a promised land, where they could be a nation (Gen. 15-17). The sign of that covenant was the circumcision of every male child. After the covenant with Abraham, the Israelites - descended from Abraham’s grandson Jacob, whom an angel renamed Israel - migrated during a famine into Egypt. There they lived as slaves until God gave them a deliverer named Moses, who led them out of Egypt and into the land of the Canaanites (roughly modern Palestine), which God had promised to them so long ago. Moses received God’s third covenant on Mount Sinai, where he was given the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets by the finger of God himself. The ‘Law of Moses’, which was far more complex, specific and demanding than just the Ten Commandments, filled most of the biblical books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Even after their escape from Egypt, the Jews continued to be persecuted by occupying forces, for example, by the successors of Alexander the Great, and later by the Romans. One of the chief promises of God was that he would raise up a messiah, an ‘anointed one’, to save the Jews. Most Jews today believe that this messiah has not yet come. In the Christian tradition, however, the messiah was born in an eastern province of the Roman Empire, during the reign of Augustus Caesar. This was Jesus.
The life and teachings of Jesus were recorded four times, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospels of Luke (2:1-7) and Matthew (2:1) both claim that Jesus was conceived without a human father, but by supernatural means in the womb of a virgin named Mary, and was born as a human being at Bethlehem. In looking back, Christians have seen many ‘messianic’ texts in the Old Testament, that is, texts that seemed to them to predict the coming of Jesus. In Christian understanding, the coming of Jesus created a new and final covenant between God and all mankind, which replaced the Mosaic covenant with the Jews.
V. The Incarnation
That God’s son became a human being is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to be put into flesh’. The Incarnation occurred through Jesus’s miraculous birth from the Virgin Mary, whom God had specially chosen to become Christ’s mother.
During his life on earth, Jesus taught, performed miracles and gathered disciples in and around Jerusalem. He was betrayed by one of his own followers and arrested by the Jews, who turned him over to their Roman overlords. The Romans executed Jesus by crucifixion. Christians believe that Jesus’s willing suffering and death made up for the sin of his and every human’s ancestor, Adam, and satisfied his heavenly father’s just anger. Jesus’s satisfaction of the penalty for human sin is comprehended in various doctrines of Atonement. For example, Augustine taught that Christ suffered in humanity’s place, and thus freed humanity from death and the devil. This is called the ‘substitution’ or ‘ransom’ theory of atonement: Jesus acted as a substitute for humankind, paying the ranson for our sins. Contrast this with the ‘satisfaction’ theory of atonement, developed by the theologian Anselm of Canterbury. According to Anselm (c.1033-1109), Adam’s original sin was such a great insult to God that only Jesus, who was both God and man, could be a perfect sacrifice to satisfy it.
Christianity was built on the conviction that Jesus’s death was not the end. On the third day after the crucifixion, God the Father undid the effects of death and brought Jesus back to life, which was his Resurrection, a word meaning ‘to rise up again’. Jesus remained on earth for 40 days in his resurrected state, teaching his followers, especially the 12 apostles. He created his church by commissioning the apostles to make disciples of all nations. They were to baptise their converts in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and were to teach them to obey Jesus’s commands (Matt. 28:19-20). Jesus then rose to heaven, an act called his Ascension, where he was seated at the right hand of his Father.
Vi. The nature of the Trinity
God came to be understood as a Trinity of three persons sharing one divine nature, or one God in three persons: Father, Son and Spirit. The most common ritual gesture of Christianity, the sign of the cross, reminds believers constantly of ‘the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. But this doctrine did not come into being uncontested. The passage in 1 John 5:7 gives biblical authority to the idea of the Trinity: ‘And there are Three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word [Jesus], and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.’ Yet some early Christians questioned the nature of the Trinity based on the nature of Jesus. For example, Paul of Samosata (200-75), Bishop of Antioch, believed that Jesus was born an ordinary man, but became the son of God after his baptism, an idea that was condemned at the Synod of Antioch in 269. Arius (c.250-336), a priest in Alexandria, offered the most prominent counter to the doctrine of the Trinity. He taught that God the Father had come before God the Son, and that the Son was therefore created, and hence of lesser divinity than the Father. This may seem like so much theological nitpicking, but for Jesus to be central to the story of salvation, he would have to be fully God and fully man in one and the same person. In 325, the Council of Nicaea settled the matter, declaring that Jesus was ‘of the same being’ as the Father, and that the complete Godhead was comprised of ‘three persons in one being’. Despite this decree, Arianism continued into the seventh century, and was especially popular among the Germanic kingdoms of the early medieval period, as we will see in the following chapters.
Vil. Eve and Mary
Christianity gave the world two iconic images of women: Eve and Mary. (See Figure 1.) According to a long-developed tradition, Eve was essentially flawed, perhaps even wicked. In spite of the fact that both Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit, in what became the normative reading of the Genesis story, it was Eve who was cast as the temptress, Eve who instigated the ‘Fall’ of humans, and Eve who was responsible for humans being tainted with original sin. Augustine was one of the greatest promoters of this idea, which would have a profound effect on medieval views of women for centuries. For example, in one of his letters, he wrote:
What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman. | fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.°
Mary, on the other hand, was the pinnacle of goodness and virtue. By the seventh century, Christians celebrated her conception with a feast day, and as this feast spread it eventually found the word immaculate (from the Latin immacula: without stain) attached to it. The idea of immaculate conception was that Mary had been born free from Eve’s original sin, thus making her worthy to be the virgin mother of Jesus. Readers should not confuse Mary’s immaculate conception - in her mother’s womb, the product of sexual intercourse, yet free from sin - and the virginal conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb through the Holy Spirit. The idea of Mary’s immaculate conception was not without its critics, including Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Thomas Aquinas. If Mary was conceived without sin, it made it look as if she did not need Jesus for redemption. The Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) argued that Mary could be immaculately conceived and still be redeemed by Christ, but that redemption would be special because of Marty’s special role as Christ’s mother. The church did not formally proclaim the doctrine of Immaculate Conception until 1854.
Vill. The Last Judgement
Jesus promised, or threatened, to return unexpectedly to judge the living and the dead. In every generation (of the Middle Ages and even today) people have believed that the return of Jesus, called his ‘Second Coming’, would be soon. At that moment, dead bodies would rise and be reunited with their souls. The final chapter of history would then be written, with the just and the unjust receiving what they deserved in a cosmic judgement.
In spite of how frightening this may sound, it reveals one of the lasting attractions of Christianity: that it seeks to explain the universe, that its story is cosmic in scope, embracing the full sweep of prehistory, history and posthistory. It began before time and will end, according to tradition, after time comes to a violent halt. Therefore the future is also a part of the Christian account of history. Christian tradition posited not only where the universe had come from but also where it was headed. The age of grace, which began with Jesus, was not permanent, since it too was a stage in God’s cosmic plan. Time would end, material creation would pass away, and only the spiritual worlds of heaven and hell would remain. Every human being who had ever lived would be judged when Jesus returned to earth on the clouds in majesty. The New Testament had vivid descriptions of the troubled last days that would precede the end of temporal things and the general judgement of all humans.
As this chapter has shown, even those teachings of Christianity that believers might consider basic (unchanging, eternal) did not come into existence all at once. Many of them grew out of interpretations that developed over time, as a direct result of historical contingencies. Let us turn now to those earliest contingencies, to begin to see how the medieval church and its doctrines developed.
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