5
The Dark Ages
Falling Dominoes
The term Dark Ages applies chiefly in the West, in the period roughly 400 to 1000.1 Although the Western Empire survived as an important entity for several centuries, and even experienced periodic recoveries, the darkness of the Dark Ages was the result of a series of falling dominoes. The ultimate doom of the Empire was ordained by its very habit of conquest, which eventually resulted in a territorial overexpansion that placed impossible strains on finances and manpower. In the West, the collapse of imperial authority that could guarantee order often reduced the struggle for power to murderous intrigues and rebellions. But that was not the only causes of moral disorder, which was equally prevalent in the sophisticated Byzantine Empire and extended even to the highest levels of the Church.
However oppressive it may have been, the Empire enforced a comprehensive social order that allowed ordinary life to go on. But as its armies gradually withdrew from its various provinces, and as invaders continued to break through even those narrower imperial boundaries, every aspect of life suffered. Trade and agriculture were severely disrupted by the collapse of the rule of law, by marauding armies who instilled in people a fear that inhibited planning for the future.
Disease
In the period roughly 540 to 750, both East and West were also ravaged by a pandemic—probably the bubonic plague—that was possibly even more devastating than the better-known outbreak of the fourteenth century. The struggle for survival was so all-consuming that there was little energy for other things, and cultural life therefore suffered on all levels, from philosophy to skilled crafts.
Barbarian Invasions
The barbarians were a people whose time had come and who showed more energy and determination than their exhausted enemies. The term barbarian had been coined by the Greeks, apparently in mockery of what to them was unintelligible gibberish (“bar, bar”) spoken by “uncivilized” people—those who were “outside the city”, hence crude and backward. Along with political, economic, and cultural decline, the Dark Ages were a time of shocking moral evils—brutality and ruthlessness not necessarily worse than classical Roman behavior but often starker, especially since many of the perpetrators were professed Christians who were, in their own way, sincere in their faith. The Romans were scarcely a peaceful people, nor were the barbarians uniquely savage. All ancient peoples exalted courage in battle, but for the barbarians it was a way of life, almost the only way of achieving status.
Migrations
Over a period of three centuries, the barbarian tribes, some of whom had lived settled lives as farmers before being forced off their lands by other tribes, migrated in a general pattern from northeast to southwest, pushed by enemies, by economic troubles, and by the attraction of treasure and a warmer climate. At first, the Romans sought to control the barbarian threat by allowing some tribes to settle in the Empire in return for military support against other tribes, an arrangement that in the long run proved suicidal. In the late fourth century, barbarians began to pour across the frontiers. The barbarians were restless nomads whose wealth consisted primarily of flocks of animals and whose spirit was profoundly warlike. Their migrations were wide-ranging and often unobstructed, with tribes repeatedly crossing one another’s paths and doubling back on themselves, until they found some territory where they could settle permanently
Visigoths
The Visigoths (West Goths), coming from Asia Minor, stormed into Greece, looped around the Adriatic Sea, advanced almost to the southern tip of Italy, established a kingdom in central Italy, then looped back again, following the Mediterranean coast around into Spain, where they established a second kingdom.
Huns
Their enemies the Huns made an incursion into Italy under the fierce chieftain Attila (d. 453), advancing on Rome until persuaded to turn back by Pope Leo the Great, reportedly because the barbarian leader saw a vision of Peter and Paul above the Pope’s head. Eventually, the Huns settled in the central European region that became Hungary.
Ostrogoths
The Ostrogoths (East Goths) were driven from the Black Sea region by the Huns and penetrated as far as Ravenna, the capital of imperial administration in the West, finally settling in the eastern European areas that were later called the Balkans.
Vandals
The Vandals, beginning in the northeast, advanced across Germany into Gaul, southward into Spain, across the Mediterranean into Africa, then across again into Italy, sacking Rome in 455, and eventually establishing kingdoms in both North Africa and Spain.
Franks and Lombards
The people whom the Romans called the Germans had lived north and east of the Rhine and Danube rivers for centuries, repeatedly threatening the Empire’s borders. Now one German tribe, the Franks, crossed the Rhine and conquered Gaul, and another, the Lombards (“Long Beards”), first ventured into eastern Europe but eventually settled in northern Italy, giving their name to the region around Milan.
Angles and Saxons
The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—all German tribes living beyond the Rhine—crossed to the island of Britain, renaming it England (Angle-land). The pre-barbarian Celtic culture survived in Scotland; in Ireland; in the farthest western areas of Britain called Cornwall and Wales; in Brittany, which was westernmost Gaul; and in parts of Spain.
Rome Sacked
In 378, after being betrayed and oppressed by the Romans with whom they had made a pact, the Goths rebelled and at Adrianople (Asia Minor) inflicted a crushing blow on the Roman army, killing Emperor Valens. The Vandals sacked Rome in 410, as did the Visigoths in 455, although a nominal emperor survived until deposed by the Visigoths in 476. With the approval of the Byzantine emperor Zeno (475-491), the Ostrogoths conquered Italy in 488. Justinian I, the greatest of the Byzantine emperors, later reconquered it, but his achievement did not long survive his death.
Barbarian Society
Precarious New States
As the barbarian tribes settled down within the imperial boundaries, they established precarious states dependent on the personal qualities of their chieftains, who were now proclaimed by the title of “king” and whose kingdoms often disintegrated after the first kings passed from the scene.
Ambivalent Relations
The barbarians had a love-hate relationship with the remains of the Empire, on the one hand relishing robbery and sheer destruction for their own sakes but on the other, recognizing some of the achievements of Roman civilization and appropriating them for themselves. This relationship extended to religion. While eventually all the tribes became Christians, as pagans they attacked churches and monasteries with particular ferocity, because of the riches conspicuously available in those places but perhaps also because of a half-conscious resentment of an institution that possessed a mysterious authority so alien to the warrior code. The great Italian monastery of Monte Cassino was destroyed twice during the Dark Ages but refounded each time.
The Romanized Christians, including Italians, Spanish, Gauls, Africans, and some Britons, in turn had ambivalent attitudes toward the barbarians. They were terrified by wave upon wave of atrocities, yet they feared that the scourge had been sent by God to punish them for their own sins. Although to the Romans, barbarian life may have looked chaotic, the various peoples had detailed law codes that defined social hierarchies, protected the rights of the various classes, and embodied a rough concept of justice. The fragile power of the state gradually transferred the obligation of vengeance from the individual to an impersonal authority that was supposed to be guided by an ideal of justice, primarily through the custom of wergild (Old English for “man price”), which exacted monetary payment from transgressors, the amount being determined both by the nature of the offense and by the social statuses of the victim and the offended.
Tribal Society
Society was organized around kinship and an ethic of personal loyalty, a society of free tribesmen in which each man had his place and lived in fidelity to strong leaders, who usually acted only in accord with the consensus of their warriors and whose power depended on the number of retainers they supported with war booty. Social status was to a great extent established by this booty and other gifts given and received. The Church was also expected to bestow gifts, although she tried to teach the barbarians that these were primarily spiritual in nature.
Marriage
Although sometimes polygamous, barbarian society valued marriage and punished adultery, because marriage was a means of establishing a dynasty and enhancing the family’s wealth and power, while adultery undermined kinship ties. Although the Church tried to hold both sexes to the same code of sexual behavior, the barbarians, like the Romans, adhered to the “double standard” whereby the adultery of men was less serious than that of their wives. Men did not want to be responsible for children who were not their own.
Chastity
While high-minded pagan Romans could understand the ideal of chastity as the conquest of passion, it was, like the ideals of meekness and forgiveness, difficult for the barbarians to appreciate, a fact that probably made monasticism incomprehensible. The Irish monk St. Columban (or Columbanus, d. 615) was driven out of the Frankish kingdom because of his strict moral views, and another Irish monk, St. Kilian (d. ca. 689), was martyred in Germany by a newly converted barbarian chief whom he rebuked for retaining his mistresses and for marrying his cousin.
Arian Barbaians
Not all barbarians were pagans. The Goths had been converted to Arianism by the priest Ulfilas (d. 382), a former slave. There was an Arian Gothic church with a bishop at Constantinople and a Gothic translation of the Bible. The Ostrogoths and the Lombards were also converted to Arian Christianity during their wanderings, and the heresy was especially spread by the Vandals, who inflicted their savagery on orthodox Catholics with particular fury. For a time, there were Arian kingdoms in France, Italy, Spain, and North Africa, but by 600, most of their kings had been converted to orthodoxy and had commanded their subjects to do the same.
The Church in the Barbarian World
A Higher Order
The barbarian invasions themselves caused many pagans to turn to Christianity for an ideal of universality that replaced the Empire. Since the Church transcended all earthly regimes, she was the only institution not dragged down by the Empire’s fall, continuing to exist as an autonomous order. The monastic life was the dominant ideal of the Dark Ages, the principal source of hope in a bleak world. While relatively few people answered this “call to perfection”, and while it was thought possible for those living in the world to be saved, monks and nuns served as models for the rest of mankind of how to live for the Kingdom.
Episcopal Cities
Cities survived in the Dark Ages primarily as centers of ecclesiastical life, with bishops having both religious and political authority. With the decline of the Roman Empire, towns survived primarily as the seats of episcopal authority, but in the later Dark Ages, merchants and other laymen formed themselves into self-governing “communes” that struggled with bishops for control.
Monasticism
As city life declined and most people came to live in rural villages, new means had to be found to serve their spiritual needs; and, since monasteries were usually built in remote areas, it was often monks who brought the faith to the pagans. Bishops, monasteries, and, to a lesser extent, lay lords carried out most of the charitable work of the age, as swarms of beggars regularly gathered outside their gates.
Patrick
Christianity probably came to Ireland sometime after the Roman conquest of Britain in the first century, since there were at least a few Christians on the Emerald Isle when St. Patrick arrived three hundred years later. Patrick (d. 493)2 became the best known and most revered of all the saints of the Dark Ages. His origins are uncertain—though probably from Britain—but he was enslaved and taken to Ireland as a young man and, after regaining his freedom, returned there to convert the people, the first missionary known to have evangelized beyond the western frontiers of the Empire.
Irish Monasticism
Monasticism had become popular in Ireland by the sixth century, and it took a unique form in accord with the Irish customs whereby the island was divided not into territorial principalities but into semi-nomadic tribal units under chieftains. It was thus impractical to organize dioceses on the Continental model, and instead the monastery served as the basic unit of church life. Linked to particular clans and chieftains, some monasteries had as many as a thousand monks and dependents, all of them regarded as the family of their patron saint. Abbots (sometimes abbesses) governed, with bishops serving only to administer the sacraments.
The Celtic monks observed very strict fasts, harnessed themselves to ploughs in the fields, prayed for long periods with their arms outstretched like a cross, and even prayed while immersed in water up to their armpits—practices that served both to expiate sins and to bring the body under control.
For a time around 600, Ireland was the cultural leader of Europe, and—unusual in the ancient world—the movement of religious revival during the Dark Ages went from West to East, from Ireland and England to the Continent. While hermits had mostly been absorbed into monastic communities elsewhere in Europe, many monks continued to live that life in the British Isles. The Irishman St. Columba (or Columkille, d. 597) founded a monastery on the isle of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, where the monks lived in cavelike cells on the bleak rocky shore, the spiritual center of Celtic Christianity. Iona and other Celtic monasteries, especially under Columban, founded daughter houses in Gaul, and when Columban was expelled from there, he went to northern Italy and helped to christianize the Lombards. St. Brendan (d. 578) was dubbed “The Navigator” because of his semi-legendary voyages over the northern oceans, including the establishment of monastic communities in Iceland.
Benedict
St. Benedict of Nursia (or Norcia, d. ca. 550) was an Italian of noble birth who, like Ambrose, Augustine, and others, first studied rhetoric at Rome, then renounced the world and became a hermit. But, like Pachomius, he saw the perils of the solitary life and of lax discipline; Benedict’s first community of monks tried to poison him because of his severity. After that, he founded a network of smaller monasteries at a place called Subiaco, then a larger community at Monte Cassino, while his sister St. Scholastica (d. ca. 543) founded communities of nuns.
The Benedictine Rule
Benedict’s Rule owed much to Cassian’s, but it largely supplanted the latter, becoming the basis of almost all later Western monasticism. The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—renouncing property, marriage, and self-will respectively—were the heart of the monastic calling, the fulfillment of Jesus’ summons to the rich young man (see Mk 10:17-22). Monks and nuns were cloistered (“closed”), formally separated from the world outside the monastery. Benedict also bound his monks to stability—remaining in one monastery for a lifetime—because restless wandering was a sign of self-will and had been one of the chief abuses of earlier monastic life.
Benedict’s Rule was characteristically Western in its practicality. Although there were strict dietary rules—never any meat and long seasonal fasts—he moderated hermetical asceticism, defined monastic organization, regulated the details of daily life, and showed concern for the material needs of the community. The exhortation ora et labora (“Pray and work”) became a kind of motto for the monastic life, with monks bound both to sing the daily Office in common and to support themselves through manual labor. Benedict and his followers did not extol manual labor for its own sake; they shared the general Christian belief of its necessity solely due to the Fall. But labor was an ascetic practice that had spiritual value, and the fact that it was integral to the lives of the monks gave it a dignity that it did not have in the classical world.
Nuns
Nuns followed a regimen similar to that of the monks, although with less strenuous physical labor. Their communities were also self-governing, under elected abbesses who had an authority unprecedented for women prior to that time. Just as brides had to bring dowries to their marriages, nuns were expected to bring dowries to their convents, which tended to create a division between richer and poorer houses, reflecting the social classes of the nuns. Many nuns were as learned as their male counterparts and wrote treatises or devotional works. The German nun Hrotsvitha (d. 1000) was widely known for her religious dramas (a rare genre at the time), poetry, and histories.
In both East and West, there were for a time double monasteries of both monks and nuns, sometimes under the authority of an abbess. Monks did the heavy manual labor, and the nuns made the monks’ robes, but they were completely separate from one another in their daily lives. Abbots and abbesses were the parents of a family but above all the spiritual masters of a “school of divine service”. The highest monastic virtue was humility, and obedience was the virtue that defined the monastic life. That life was considered distinct from the priestly calling, and the early Benedictines ordained only enough priests to celebrate the Eucharist for the community.
Monastic Life
A monastery was a self-sufficient village, comprising a church, a dormitory, a refectory (dining hall), a scriptorium (“writing place” or library), a chapter house (meeting room), a guesthouse, the necessary facilities for material needs—kitchen, store rooms, barns, and workshops for the various crafts—and surrounded by the fields that yielded food and other needs. The monasteries were models of efficiency, as monks were the first people to organize their days into precise, specialized units: times for prayer, times for work, times for eating and sleeping.
During the Dark Ages, the monasteries were living examples of civilized life, of exemplary order in an age of chaos, cities governed by laws based on Christian love, self-sufficient communities of hardworking men who lived at peace with one another. In a war-torn world, monasteries assumed roles foreign to their original cloistered ideal, notably schools where at least the rudiments of literacy and other skills were taught to aspiring monks and sometimes to the sons of lay lords as well. Boys and girls as young as seven (the accepted “age of reason”) were sent to monasteries as oblates (“offerings”) by their parents. Some interiorized the rule and were highly dedicated, but others remained misfits who were a source of trouble and disorder in monastic communities.
Besides the monks themselves, monasteries housed people who had been exiled in political struggles, penitents atoning for serious sins, ecclesiastical criminals, and networks of laborers integral to the monastic economy. One Frankish monastery comprised seven hundred people, of whom only three hundred were actually monks.
With the decline of towns, monasteries were among the densest population centers, which made them especially vulnerable both to military attack and to disease. During one visitation of such a disease, the flourishing English house of Jarrow was reduced to the abbot and a small boy.
Monasteries and Society
Parents were thought to be the best judges of whom their children should marry, decisions that among the aristocracy were based largely on dynastic considerations and among the peasantry on economic advantage. But such arranged marriages complicated religious life. Female monasticism, for the first time in history, offered a way of life for women other than marriage, which sometimes created tensions between the woman’s sense of her religious vocation and her family’s determination that she marry, so that, paradoxically, her vow of obedience might at the same time be an exercise of her free will. St. Brigid of Kildare (Ireland, d. ca. 525) was a beautiful young woman who was said to have been miraculously made ugly when her parents tried to force her to marry, a transformation that allowed for, and was reversed upon, her entry to the convent.
Reform
Monasteries too were infected by the world around them. Would-be reformers sometimes encountered armed resistance from corrupt monks who might, as in Benedict’s case, attempt to poison their abbot. One seventh-century Frankish convent was split between two factions of nuns, each of whom accused the other of vile sins and each of whom enlisted thugs to intimidate the other.
Cluny
At the beginning of the tenth century, the duke of Aquitaine in France established a new monastery at Cluny, endeavoring to protect if from undue influences by making it independent of both feudal and episcopal control, answerable only to the pope. Freed of such worldly ties, Cluny became the most vibrant center of monastic life in Europe, eventually presiding over a network of a thousand daughter houses.
The Conversion of the Barbarians
Evangelization
The evangelization of Western Europe for the most part took place through the structure of the Empire, even as the Empire declined. At first, there was no effort to convert the barbarians beyond the imperial frontiers, although Augustine, because he did not sacralize the Empire, foresaw that the barbarians would one day be evangelized. Missionaries—those who were “sent”—were pilgrims who left their own lands to follow Christ, voluntary exiles, black-robed ascetics who were the embodiment of some mysterious spiritual power.
The Church and Classical Culture
To the barbarians, Christianity was Roman, so that the monks who converted Europe were the missionaries of classical culture as well as of the Church, representatives both of the Kingdom of Heaven and of a higher worldly civilization. To a great extent, the acceptance of Christianity involved the adaptation of Roman culture, which was institutionalized in the Latin liturgy and other things. But although the variety of spoken languages was thought to be the result of the Tower of Babel, and although Latin was considered a sacred language, the missionaries were also instrumental, as in England, in the development of the vernacular languages, by regularizing their grammar and putting them into writing. (Some missionaries feared that baptism administered in garbled Latin was invalid, but Pope St. Zachary [741-752] ruled that it was not.)
The Episcopal Office
The Church triumphed partly because she was a highly organized and disciplined institution, especially in her clergy, something for which the various kinds of paganism had no counterpart. Bishops impressed the barbarians by their spiritual authority but also because they represented the old Roman aristocracy, familiar figures from the Roman administrative system. The formation of a Christian legal system, adapted from Roman law, marked the first time in history that there existed, anywhere, an autonomous, self-governing body distinct from the state. The authority of the church courts extended even to what had previously been considered secular matters, like marriages and wills.
Worldliness
Because bishops and abbots were men of great importance, they tended to live rather luxurious lives, attended on their journeys by small armies of assistants and servants. The triumph of the Church meant that at every level, especially that of the papacy itself, ecclesiastical office was attractive to those who sought worldly prizes. There were complaints of simony among the Frankish clergy, and Martin of Tours, who was unusual in being a man of low birth (a former soldier), was not at home among polished prelates, some of whom he considered worldly and comfort-loving.
The Papacy
The papacy was both an independent spiritual power and the heir to the imperial tradition. The greatest of the popes during the Dark Ages, St. Gregory I the Great (589-603), followed the precedent of Ambrose, Augustine, and others in abandoning his career as an imperial official to become a monk, later serving as papal ambassador to Constantinople. Up to 800, most popes were venerated as saints after their deaths, but there was much jockeying for office, sometimes accompanied by violence. Felix III (526-530), although himself venerated as a saint, named his own successor, Boniface II (530-532), and Boniface in turn named Vigilius, whom the priests of Rome would not accept. The imperial agent in Italy deposed Pope St. Silverius (536-538) and sent him into exile, where he died of starvation but, even before Silverius’ fate was known, Vigilius, supported by the Empress Theodora (d. 548), was elected through simony and kept the papal office through an exceptionally long reign (537-555). Once he took office, however, Vigilius was no longer Theodora’s puppet.
Bishops
The Church was primarily governed by bishops individually and meeting in synods or regional councils. They administered their dioceses through officials called archdeacons, who did most of the work of oversight and who, despite their title, eventually came to be mainly priests.
The bishop’s miter evolved from a simple cap and was not a sign of office until the eighth century, gradually evolving its unique triangular shape and becoming taller. By about 500, the authority of an archbishop required that he receive the pallium from the pope. Originally, a kind of scarf that designated a scholar or government official, the pallium evolved into a circular band worn over the shoulders. Made of purest wool in a Roman convent, it symbolized the Good Shepherd carrying the lost sheep across His shoulders.
Priests
In Italy, where there were two hundred and fifty dioceses, only bishops retained the authority to administer baptism. Elsewhere, however, the system of territorial parishes was extended and regularized, with the parish priest possessing full sacramental authority, although baptismal water had to be consecrated with holy oil and could only be blessed by a bishop. Most parish churches in rural areas were built by the local landlord, the parish being coterminous with his estate. He usually claimed the right to appoint the priest and, although it was legally forbidden, sometimes claimed the parish revenues as well. Rights over parishes were also held by bishops, cathedral chapters, and monasteries and could be sold or traded.
Unlike in the East, there was no corps of educated lay bureaucrats in the West, so that much of the governing responsibility fell on the clergy, giving the Church influence over the state but also creating a potential source of corruption of the clergy.
Sacral Kingship
The Church had grown up with the Empire as the natural political order, and Augustine’s City of God contained a picture of the ideal Christian emperor. Thus the fragmentation of the Empire into a multiplicity of barbarian kingdoms seemed less than ideal. But in the middle of the eighth century, Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Martel and the chief minister of the Frankish king Childeric III (743-752), deposed Childeric with the consent of the nobility, sent him to a monastery, and assumed the royal title for himself, thereby ending the Merovingian dynasty (named after a semi-legendary ancestor). Pepin appealed to the Pope for confirmation, and St. Zachary (741-752) approved the action on the grounds that Pepin could provide peace and order, as Childeric could not.
The subsequent solemn coronation of Pepin by St. Boniface in 751 marked the first revival of that Old Testament rite, the solemn affirmation of the idea of Christian monarchy that would dominate Catholic political thought for the next eleven centuries. The king now received a quasi-priestly character, symbolized by his being anointed at his coronation. Precedent for kingship was found in the Old Testament, whose kings possessed divine authority but who were also sinful men answerable to God’s justice, with bishops serving in the role of the Old Testament prophets.
The Two Swords
The Church that anointed the king also restricted his authority under the classical theory of the Two Swords formulated by Pope St. Gelasius I (492-496)—God granted two swords of authority, one (temporal) to the state, the other (spiritual) to the Church, to be wielded separately but in harmony, with the spiritual having the higher authority.
Catechizing the Barbarians
Methods of Catechesis
The barbarians required simpler catechetical approaches from those used in the Hellenistic world. Although there were rudimentary efforts to teach doctrine to the neophytes, conversion was primarily measured by behavior—monogamy, observance of the Lenten fast, burial rather than cremation, and above all abandonment of the worship of the old gods.
Survival in the North
Christianity continued to exist in the remote northern part of Britain even after the withdrawal of the Romans in the third century, but it almost vanished elsewhere in the island. The invasion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes was resisted by a shadowy prince sometimes called Arthur, about whom virtually nothing is known but around whom many legends later collected.
Evangelization and Diplomacy
To an extent, evangelizing missions were like diplomatic missions, in that barbarians tended to regard missionaries as representatives of, and under the protection of, foreign monarchs, and receptivity to the Gospel to some extent depended on whether the barbarians welcomed a possible alliance. Conversion might also be hampered insofar as Christianity was seen as a foreign import, possibly as an entering wedge for foreign domination, so that kings and princes were careful about from whom they would accept the faith.
Augustine of Canterbury
According to a contemporary story, in 597 Pope Gregory the Great saw a group of Angle slaves in the Roman market, punned that “they are not Angles but angels”, and commissioned Augustine (d. 604), a Roman monk, to convert the island. England was a collection of small kingdoms, and St. Augustine landed in the southeastern kingdom of Kent, which was ruled by Ethelbert (ca. 590-616), whose wife was a Frankish Christian and who himself soon converted. Augustine was accompanied by forty monks and founded an episcopal see at Canterbury, making it the capital of English Christianity. But the older Celtic Christianity still survived in northern Britain, cut off from all contact with Rome.
Clovis
In Gaul, an old romanized aristocracy survived, most of whose members were Christian and from whose ranks many of the bishops were taken. The Frankish king Clovis (481-511) made an alliance with that aristocracy in becoming a Christian and was hailed as the new Constantine. But his kingdom fragmented after his death, mainly because of the barbarian custom of dividing the land among all the sons of the deceased.
Boniface
The English monk St. Willibrord (d. 739), with the support of the Frankish king, worked among the Germans and the Danes at the end of the seventh century and was succeeded by another English monk, Winfrid (or Wynfrith [d. 754]), who was renamed Boniface (“well done”) by the Pope and sent to the Germans, with the support of Pepin the Short. Like Martin of Tours, St. Boniface avoided associating with the Frankish bishops, who in turn regarded him as an overly stern interloper. (Boniface advised against women going on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, because “a great part of them perish and few keep their virtue”).
Christian Queens
The conversion of the barbarians most often meant that the tribal leader accepted baptism, as Ethelbert did in Kent, whereupon his people followed. Noble Christian women who married barbarian princes were often instrumental in converting the societies into which they married, as happened with St. Clotilda (d. 545) among the Franks, Bertha (d. 612) among the Anglo-Saxons, St. Ludmila (d. 921) among the Bohemians, St. Olga (d. 969) among the Russians, and Leovigild (d. 589) among the Arian Spanish Visigoths.
Mass Conversions
When a barbarian chief converted, he was expected by the Church to help christianize his people by supporting missionary efforts, building churches and monasteries, endowing bishoprics, and suppressing pagan cults, an obligation that also extended to lesser lords. Unlike the Greeks and the Romans, the barbarians had little concept of individualism, so that no one opposed the king’s conversion on the grounds of conscience. But to abandon the traditional religion of the tribe was dangerous, so that conversion to Christ disturbed some people because it angered the old gods. Zealous Christians who destroyed idols or desecrated pagan shrines were sometimes killed by mobs, and chieftains who converted did not always carry their nobles with them. Occasionally, a convert was driven out of his kingdom as a result.
The barbarians’ strong sense of family caused some to be disturbed at the thought that their ancestors, having never heard the Gospel, were in Hell. One missionary to the Germans sought to overcome this by teaching that all pagans had been released from Hell by Jesus after His death, but Boniface considered that doctrine lax. Converts were taught the urgency of commemorating the dead and praying for their souls, customs that strengthened the sense of family solidarity, so that monasteries were sometimes founded explicitly for the purpose of having monks pray for the deceased of the founder’s ancestors and for himself after his own death. In a world where sudden death was common, Christianity established a new dimension of family through the institution of the godparent, an office that was not a mere formality but created a new network of relationships for the child.
Pagan Survivals
As Constantine did for a time, many of the barbarians probably embraced Christianity as representing one god among many, albeit the greatest and most powerful. A Spanish king was known to keep two altars, one Christian, one pagan, and graves sometimes displayed both the cross and pagan symbols. If Christianity’s principal appeal in the Hellenistic world was to truth, among the barbarians it was to a supernatural power that demonstrated that the Christian God was greater than the gods who were abandoned—the dramatic contrast between the saint and the warrior, this world and the world to come.
Rival Powers
Thus Patrick directly confronted the Celtic priests called druids, and Boniface won over a German tribe by boldly entering a forest and taking an axe to a large oak tree sacred to the god Odin. The Germans expected Boniface to be struck dead, and, when he was not, they concluded that the power of his God was greater than that of their own and used the wood of the tree to build a church. (After decades of highly effective work, Boniface was killed in the modern Netherlands, possibly not for religion but by robbers.)
Whatever its teachings, Christianity was often experienced by the barbarians not as pacific but as a powerful conqueror to whom it was entirely proper to submit. Violence was held in check only by the threat of God’s even more powerful wrath. Dramatic manifestations of divine power were necessary because a religion was expected to bring tangible benefits, such as victory in battle, good crops, or salvation from illness. One missionary asked the Germans why their gods had given them the frozen and barren North as their land, while the true God reserved the warm and rich South for the Christians. (Such appeals could also backfire—during a visitation of the plague in the eighth century, one English king took his people back into paganism, because the new religion had failed to halt the disease.)
Eternal Life
The promise of eternal life was the chief of the gifts the Church offered to people whose existence was bleak and precarious, with Jesus’ triumph over death recognized as His greatest miracle. A missionary in England called attention to a bird flying in at one end of a banquet hall and out at the other, comparing its brief flight to human life on earth, surrounded by the vastness of eternity, a mystery to which only the Church held the answer.
The Power of the Saints
As with the Romans, barbarian society was in many ways based on a system of patronage, whereby individuals placed themselves under the protection of powerful men, a custom that supported the developing belief in the saints as mediators between God and man. Images of saints became common, and their relics were venerated with increasing fervor, the possession of relics demonstrating that the saint was present in the local community in a special way.
Certain patterns of sanctity emerged in the Dark Ages that would continue to be venerated until early modern times: the boy who confounded his parents by recognizing his monastic vocation while still very young, the girl who vowed herself to chastity and refused all suitors, the rich man who renounced his wealth to live as a hermit, the rich widow who devoted herself entirely to the poor and sick, peasants who were the recipients of supernatural visions and messages, practitioners of severe penances. Saints manifested power while alive but even more after they were dead, dramatically vanquishing evil and bringing grace and divine favors to the communities with which they were associated. Lives of the saints (hagiography, from the Greek) were the most popular form of literature during the Dark Ages, emphasizing the miracles that confirmed that the saint represented a superior power. Martin of Tours was by far the most popular, the huge church built over his tomb becoming a major pilgrimage place.
Even though the lives of the saints included many stories of miraculous salvation from danger, they often ended in martyrdom, which was a delicate problem in that it seemed to imply defeat. But the martyrs could be understood by the barbarian as brave people slain in battle, manifesting a mysterious courage even higher than that of the warrior. The Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood (cross) portrayed Jesus as a great chief who triumphed over Satan, the Apostles as His faithful warriors, and Heaven as their victorious banquet after victory, while a German paraphrase of the Gospel referred to Jesus as a “giver of mead” (war booty) and a model for warriors because He endured pain unflinchingly and ultimately overcame His enemies.
The Warlike Spirit
The barbarians’ code of behavior probably made Jesus’ teaching about forgiving one’s enemies seem almost like an inversion of true righteousness, since the heart of the warlike spirit that dominated barbarian life was the corporate blood feud that was the major obstacle to inner conversion—the ethic of vengeance by which men were obliged to repay injuries done to themselves or their families. When a defiant warrior cut in two a golden cup that belonged to a church, Clovis, before his conversion, set matters right by cleaving the man’s own skull in two.
The bishop St. Remi (or Remigius, d. ca. 533), in baptizing Clovis, abjured him to “burn what you have adored and adore what you have burned”, and Clovis protected church property, acknowledged the special status of virgins, and respected the right of sanctuary, whereby a fugitive from the law could seek safety in a church for a limited period of time. But Clovis also sought to control the hierarchy, and his permission was required for a man to become a priest. Clovis’ own family manifested the contradictions of the age. He was converted through the influence of his wife, St. Clotilda (d. 545), who despite her best efforts saw her sons develop into brutal and ruthless warrior chiefs. One of them, Clotaire I (558-561), murdered two of his young nephews to prevent their becoming his rivals, but a third nephew, St. Cloud (d. ca. 560), became a monk. Clotaire’s wife St. Radegund (d. 587) left him to enter a convent.
However, the Church only partially stood aloof from barbarian culture, and in the process of christianizing the culture, the Church inevitably assimilated some barbarian elements to herself. Bishops were sometimes not men of peace but very much a part of the warrior culture: an eighth-century bishop of Mainz, for example, was deposed because he mounted a campaign of revenge against his father’s slayer.
Magic
Church authorities constantly warned against the use of spells and of attempts to predict the future and forbade such things as the use of drinking horns as chalices at Mass. But innumerable pagan customs found a lasting home in popular Christian piety. Boniface set his face against almost all accommodations to pagan culture, but Gregory the Great urged the missionaries to adapt such customs wherever possible, turning pagan temples into churches and allowing the cults of the gods and the spirits to be transformed into the cults of the saints. Pagan shrines and magical practices became associated with Christian saints, as did wells or springs thought to be inhabited by a water spirit. In Sweden, the relatively small town of Uppsala was made the seat of an archbishopric in order to transform its character as a great pagan shrine. It was a strategy that eased the transition from paganism to Christianity but fostered an often intense piety in which pagan beliefs and practices survived under a thin Christian veneer, something that would endure even into the age of modern science.3
New Invasions
Muslims in Spain
As the barbarians struggled to achieve political and social stability, new waves of conquest swept over the West. The Muslims destroyed what remained of the rich Christian culture of North Africa, conquered and occupied Spain in 711, and in 732 advanced across the Pyrenees into the Frankish kingdom as far as Poitiers, where they were turned back by Charles Martel (“the Hammer”, d. 741), in a momentous battle that, had it gone the other way, would probably have resulted in all of Europe’s becoming Muslim. (For a time, the Muslims continued to control parts of southern France.) Cordoba—a city of as many as ninety thousand people—became one of Europe’s most important cultural and political centers. The Great Mosque (now a church), built around 800, was the grandest building constructed in the West during the Dark Ages, and there was also a university. At first, Islamic Spain was ruled from Damascus (Syria), but in 932 a caliphate (a Muslim institution that combined political and religious authority in one man) was also established at Cordoba.
People of the Book
In accordance with the Qur’an’s instructions for dealing with “the people of the book” (the Bible), Christians under Muslim rule in Spain were not usually persecuted outright but had a distinctly inferior status and were vulnerable to periodic outbursts of violence. Occasional Christian rebellions produced martyrs who inspired yet further resistance. Conversions from Islam to Christianity were very few and were punished by death under Islamic law. Many Christians became Muslims, an act that was also punishable by death under Spanish Christian law.
The Christian Counter-Offensive
During the eighth century, the Christian kingdom of Asturias was established in the mountains of northern Spain, to which a large number of Christians came as exiles from the South and which, under successive kings Alfonso I the Catholic, Alfonso II the Chaste, and Alfonso III the Great (739-910), was the precarious center of resistance to Muslim rule. (Alfonso IV became a monk.) The small kingdom of Leon became the center of Christian resistance. However, partly because of the internal strife endemic to the age, including sons against fathers and brothers against brothers, Spanish Christians were barely able to keep the limited territories they controlled. The discovery of what was believed to be the tomb of St. James the Greater at Compostela became Europe’s most popular pilgrimage place and the rallying point for resistance to the Muslims. It was destroyed in 995 but was soon rebuilt.
The Carolingian Age
Pepin
Meanwhile, as the popes struggled against the Byzantine Empire, which still laid claim to Italy, the Lombards, even though having been christianized, constituted a more immediate threat to papal independence. Beginning in the eighth century, rival families, amidst murderous feuds, connived to place their own men on the papal throne and used the most brutal tactics to achieve their goal. Pepin responded to a papal appeal, and drove the Lombards from Rome.
The Donation of Constantine
Pepin also confirmed the pope’s claim to certain Italian territories, based on a document from the papal archives called the Donation of Constantine, which purportedly showed that, when the first Christian emperor moved to the East, he ceded all political authority in the West to the pope. The papacy also relied on a collection of documents later called the False Decretals—purportedly compiled by St. Isidore, the scholarly bishop of Seville (d. 636) but actually compiled 250 years later—containing alleged papal decrees from the fourth century that also showed that the popes possessed temporal power.4
Ironically, the “donation of Pepin” had a negative effect on the Church, in that the pope’s position as a secular lord plunged the papacy even more deeply into the morass of Italian politics and made the office extremely attractive in worldly terms, helping to corrupt papal politics for the next three centuries.
Charlemagne
Several times more the popes had to appeal to the Franks against the Lombards, and in 800 Pope St. Leo III (795-816), after being attacked and mutilated in the streets of Rome during a procession, fled across the Alps to ask for protection from Pepin’s son Charles the Great (Charlemagne, 768-814), who answered the papal appeal by once again vanquishing the pope’s enemies.
On Christmas Day, as Charlemagne was at Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Leo placed a crown on his head and proclaimed him emperor. Although the imperial title has often been assumed to have been the reward Charlemagne demanded for his assistance to the Pope, the new emperor claimed that he had not anticipated it, and Leo may well have acted on his own, regarding a universal empire as the only fully legitimate kind of state and realizing that only a powerful monarch of great prestige could restore order to a chaotic world.
But the action was dubiously legal, in that the emperors at Constantinople still considered themselves the heirs of Rome. Thus the new state had no theoretical basis except that of the papacy itself. In bestowing the imperial title, the Pope appeared to make a dramatic assertion of his own authority, restoring the Roman Empire under the direct auspices of the Church. But the symbolism was ambiguous, in that Leo also prostrated himself before the new emperor as his legitimate secular lord and Charlemagne’s proclamations announced that he had been “crowned by God”.
The Imperial Court
At Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Charlemagne built a palace that was the most ambitious Christian architectural undertaking in the West for centuries and where the unity of church and state was manifest by the imperial throne’s being erected in the chapel itself, albeit in the west end, because the East was the throne of God. The chapel, which was of very modest size compared with those of the East, was nonetheless in the Eastern style, modeled after a Byzantine church at Ravenna, symbolizing the heavenly Jerusalem, with a dome from which Christ Pantocrator (“Ruler of All”) presided.
Forced Conversions
Although Gregory the Great had condemned forced conversions, when Charlemagne brought eastern Germany under his control, he ordered the Saxons to become Christians, their acceptance of his religion being a necessary part of their submission to him. Conversion was to be signaled by refraining from assaults on priests and churches, observance of the Lenten fast, and burying rather than cremating the dead, and when Charlemagne learned that those demands were being disregarded, he slaughtered a reported 4,500 people, despite the objections of his monk-advisor, St. Alcuin of York (d. 804).
Marriage and Concubinage
Charlemagne also ignored Church teaching when it seemed to undermine his dynastic interests. He married five times, divorced several of his wives, had six concubines, and, fearing that sons-in-law would become his rivals, forbade his daughters to marry and instead allowed them to have children by their paramours.
A Universal Monarchy
Both a ruthless warrior and a man of ideals, Charlemagne made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish a universal monarchy that was both Roman and Christian. He built up an effective centralized administrative system and traveled constantly in order to maintain his grip on so vast a territory. At its height, his empire included modern Germany, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, northern Italy, and parts of Poland, Austria, and Hungary.
Charlemagne was able to conquer part of Spain, but it was later reclaimed by the Muslims, and he settled for a buffer state on the Spanish border. His Spanish invasion demonstrated the complexity of the Spanish situation. Some Muslim leaders, fearful of the powerful ruler of Cordoba, ‘Abd ar-Rahman I (756-788), encouraged Charlemagne, while the Catholic Basque people resisted him. (The legendary knight Roland [d. 778], who became the subject of an epic poem, was actually killed in the fight against the Basques, not the Muslims.)
Church and State
Like the Christian emperors before him, in trying to create an all-embracing sacred order, Charlemagne continually involved himself in Church matters, promulgating what became the universal Code of Canon Law and even successfully claiming authority over the liturgy. He intervened in the dispute over icons in the East (see Chapter Seven below, pp. 193-95), issuing a decree that sacred images were merely reminders of the person honored and were not to be venerated, a doctrine that went contrary to papal teaching.
The custom whereby bishops were elected by the people of a diocese had by Charlemagne’s time evolved into election by chapters (Latin for “heads”)—the cathedral clergy who aided the bishop in governing the diocese. But, in a pattern that was to be followed by many rulers over the centuries, Charlemagne often simply appointed bishops and required the chapters to acquiesce. He also sometimes left dioceses vacant in order to collect their revenues.
The End of the Empire
Charlemagne’s experiments failed after his death. His son Louis the Pious (814-840), who was crowned by Pope Stephen IV (816-817) at Rheims, had the virtues indicated by his epithet, but he was a weak ruler. In 833, the Frankish bishops acquiesced in his deposition by his own sons, then reversed themselves two years later, after Louis managed to defeat his enemies. After his death, the Empire split first into three, then into two kingdoms—France and Germany—with the German ruler retaining the imperial title. The separate kingdoms were then also divided, their rulers often unable to maintain order in the face of constant warfare among powerful and independent-minded nobles. In the tenth century, episcopal support was crucial to the ascendancy of the Capetian dynasty in France (named for its first king), which would rule for almost four hundred years.
Alfred the Great
During the Dark Ages, the ideal of Christian kingship found its purest representative not in Charlemagne but in the Anglo-Saxon Alfred the Great (ca. 900), who held the marauding Vikings at bay, governed justly, encouraged piety and learning, and was venerated as a saint after his death. He was remarkable in being fully literate, even translating several Latin works.
Feudalism
Lord and Vassals
The society of the barbarians gradually evolved into the system later called feudalism, a precarious hierarchy with the king at the top, various grades of nobility below him, a small class of merchants, and the mass of people, mostly peasants, at the bottom. Booty increasingly took the form of land, a practice that tended to fragment both economic and political power among local lords only loosely subject to the king or emperor. Feudalism (from the Latin word for “contract”) emerged as an attempt to maintain some degree of order in the absence of a strong central government. In this system, no one owned land outright. A vassal (“servant”) was a free man who entered into a contract with a lord whereby he received land—a fief (beneficium, meaning “well done”)—in return for loyalty and service, which were primarily military in nature. In practice, a lord’s vassals were often in revolt against him.
Serfdom
The great majority of people were farmers, either as free peasants or, increasingly, as serfs, a term derived from the Latin word for slave but less absolute in its implications—lords did not have the power of life and death over their serfs, who were regarded less as personal property than as belonging to particular landed estates.
Ecclesiastical Benefices
The Church as an institution required economic resources, and from the time of Constantine, she too was given grants of land, to the point where she was eventually the largest possessor of that most valuable of earthly commodities. At every level, church offices were treated as “benefices”, as though they were to be valued mainly in terms of their income, something that encouraged clerical greed and gave rise to the abuses called pluralism—holding more than one benefice at the same time—and absenteeism. However, beginning with Charles Martel, Frankish rulers appropriated a great deal of church land for their own purposes or granted it to laymen. As compensation, Charlemagne instituted a church tax based on the Old Testament tithe and ordered that a plot of land in each parish be reserved to the Church.
Prince Bishops
Since the possession of land included political authority, Emperor Otto I (962-973) solidified the new alliance of Church and Empire whereby bishops were territorial princes, an arrangement that gave them prestige and wealth but was another step in the process by which the spiritual and the temporal became so intertwined as to threaten the Church’s integrity. The bishops were necessarily involved in complex feudal politics, including interminable small wars among rival lords and periodic revolts against the king.
Free Alms
Churchmen usually provided military service to their lords by subdividing their land still further, giving it to knights who fought in the priests’ place. A minority of grants to the Church were gifts in “free alms”, which only required the clerical recipient to pray for the donor. Priests were forbidden to shed blood, but even bishops occasionally fought in battles. (One of them evaded the letter of the law by assaulting his opponents with an iron ball on a chain, a weapon that could kill but did not cause much bleeding.)
Priestly Classes
Priests tended to be of the same social class as those whom they served, with the higher clergy having noble status, whatever their origins, and village priests living like the serfs to whom they ministered and sometimes themselves having servile status. Besides the spiritual value of celibacy, it was promoted to prevent clergy from establishing family dynasties, which were by no means unknown in the Dark Ages. Pope Silverius was the son of Pope St. Hormisdas (514-523)—fathered before Hormisdas was ordained—and Gregory the Great was the grandson of Pope Felix III. A serf could become a priest only with his lord’s permission, but in an increasingly rigid hierarchical society the Church, partly because celibacy prevented the formation of clerical dynasties, rewarded merit. The highly learned Pope Sylvester II (999-1002), for example, was of peasant origins.
The Nadir of the Papacy
The ninth and tenth centuries were the nadir of the entire history of the papacy, when it again fell under the control of murderous factions. Some popes were notorious, and few could exercise even the least spiritual authority. Kings and emperors often treated the papacy as under their control, and popes in turn intrigued in secular politics. Ironically, although it was made subject to papal authority in order to protect its own purity, Cluny served as the spiritual center of the Church during an age of many unworthy popes. There were occasional saintly popes, such as Hadrian III (884-885), who was nonetheless murdered in one of the continuous intrigues that swirled around the papal office.
Papal Elections
One of Charlemagne’s grandsons, Lothair (817-855), decreed that no papal election was valid unless given imperial approval, and he interfered with liberties of the Church in other ways. Another grandson, Louis II the German (843-876), confirmed the same decrees, but the clergy of Rome defied Louis in order to elect Benedict III (855-858). Imperial interference sometimes had unexpectedly good results, as a few years later Louis was able to bring about the election of St. Nicholas I (858-867), who proved to be strong and independent-minded. (When Nicholas refused to grant Louis’ brother a divorce and deposed the Frankish bishops who sanctioned it, the emperor threatened the Pope with an army, a threat that was aborted only by Louis’ sudden illness.)
“Bad Popes”
The unvirtuous John VIII (872-882), the subject of the entirely apocryphal story of “Pope Joan”, was also murdered under uncertain circumstances, and Leo V (903) and the anti-pope Christopher both died in prison, probably on orders of Pope Sergius III (904-911). The low point in the history of the entire papacy was reached in 897, when the body of Pope Formosus (891-896) was exhumed by orders of Pope Stephen VI5 (896-897), placed upon the papal throne in its vestments, formally “tried” for violations of Church law, found guilty, stripped of its vestments, and desecrated. Stephen himself was strangled in prison later that year, and Formosus’ honor was restored.
Despite the existence of the Western Empire, Byzantine representatives remained influential at Rome, especially the Theophylactus family, which gave several popes to the Church. John XI (931-935) became pope through the machinations of his notorious mother, Marozia. John XII (955-964), Marozia’s grandson, became pope at the age of sixteen and was accused of every kind of abuse. He was probably guilty of most of the accusations, and he was deposed by Emperor Otto I (962-973), who, dissatisfied with John’s elected successor Benedict V (964), took Benedict to Germany and set up Leo VIII (964-965) in his place.
The Vikings
Besides the Muslims, the unending forces of disorder manifested themselves in the ninth century in the sudden explosion of the Northmen or Norsemen of Scandinavia—also called Danes or Vikings, from a word for an inlet of the sea. The Northmen were yet another in the long line of invaders for whom war was the principal activity of life. Ireland was their first target, but almost no part of Europe was safe, as they ravaged the British Isles, destroying the culture that had reached a peak under Alfred the Great; swept down the Atlantic along the Frankish coast, penetrating inland to sack Paris and Aachen; and continued around into the Mediterranean, inflicting havoc on both Muslim Spain and Catholic Italy. For a time, the Litany of the Saints included the plaintive cry, “From the peril of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us!”
Brutality
The Northmen were brutal. A Saxon king, St. Edmund (d. 870), they dismembered while still alive, and an archbishop of Canterbury, St. Alphege (d. 1012), they beat to death with clubs and animal bones. Monasteries, because they were wealthy and often undefended, were their special targets, causing the great monasteries of Iona and Lindisfarne to be temporarily abandoned. For a time, monasticism survived by monks living in cave-like stone cells on barren islands off the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. The monks of Lindisfarne wandered for seven years with the body of their sainted abbot, Cuthbert (d. 687), until finding a new home.
New Settlements
At first mere raiders, in time, the Danes settled on lands they conquered, as in Ireland, where they founded the settlement that became Dublin. In England, the Danelaw took up more than half the country, and a Dane, Oda (d. 926), even served as archbishop of Canterbury. The king of France bribed the Vikings with the extensive territory that came to be called Normandy, and a branch of the Vikings called the Rus gave their name to the territory that eventually became Russia. Danes colonized Iceland and Greenland and briefly (ca. 1000) what would later be called Newfoundland.
Viking Conversions
The Vikings often sought nothing less than the destruction of Christianity itself, and, although many became nominal Catholics during their travels, the missionaries sent to them had little effect. When they settled in Normandy, however, they became Christians as a condition of the grant. England was a source of Christian influence in Scandinavia, and the archbishopric of Bremen-Hamburg, on the Baltic coast of Germany, was also a center of missionary activity.
Two tenth-century Norwegian kings—Haakon the Good (946-961) and Olaf I Tryggvason (995-999)—were converted to Christianity in England, and Christianity became official in Denmark under King Canute (1016-1035), who also ruled much of England. St. Olaf II (1016-1030) made the new religion official in Denmark and, after being defeated and killed by Canute, was venerated as a saint even by his conqueror, a focal point of Viking popular religion. Olaf of Sweden (995—ca. 1022) became a Christian and imported English missionaries. Iceland was unique in the history of Christianity, becoming Christian by vote of the inhabitants in 1000, following established Icelandic custom. First, however, a pagan prophet went into a kind of trance, after which he announced that the island should be of one religion, so as to avoid division.
The Last Converts
In Central Europe, Bohemia became officially Christian under the duke St. Wenceslaus (d. 929),6 who was murdered by his brother at the door of a church and venerated as a martyr. The Church first came to Poland from Bohemia, beginning with the marriage of a Polish prince to a Bohemian princess in 964. The missionary bishop St. Adalbert (d. 997) was sent to Poland from Bohemia and, after being killed by Germans who were contending for control of Polish territory, was venerated as the apostle of Poland. The Wends were Slavic people (so-called in the West because, as non-Christians, they could be made slaves) living on the borders between Germany and Poland. The Saxons made a partially successful effort to subdue and christianize the Wends in the tenth century, but the Wends later rebelled, returned to paganism, and slaughtered Christians. Around the same time as the Viking onslaughts, the Muslims invaded southern Italy, perpetrating yet another sack of Rome. At the same time, a new barbarian people—the Magyars—devastated central Europe before settling down in Hungary.
The Magyars, Poles, and Russians all became Christians around the same time as the Vikings, after which the recovery of Western civilization was rapid, based on a chain of Christian monarchies stretching from Ireland to Russia in the North and southward to Italy and Spain.
The Decline of Culture
Schools
The decline of the West could be measured by the closing of many schools in the midst of the struggle for survival. The most telling evidence was the gradual disappearance of the Greek language, something that cut off the Western Church not only from much of the richness of patristic theology but from the original text of the New Testament itself. Even before the barbarian onslaught, Augustine of Hippo did not read Greek, and Jerome learned it only after he moved to Palestine, although it survived for a while in some of the Irish monasteries.
Precarious Learning
Despite the overall decline of culture, learning was revered in the Dark Ages and knowledge limited only by the harsh conditions of life. Skill in Latin also declined, but Christians continued to respect classical learning, much of which was kept alive in variousencyclopediae, such as those compiled by St. Isidore of Seville—elementary textbooks that minimally preserved the Western cultural heritage until such time as there might be a new intellectual flowering. The word science was simply the Latin term for “knowledge” and was not confined to the physical world. But knowledge of the physical world was preserved during the Dark Ages, as in the compilations of the German archbishop Rabanus Maurus (d. 856). There was measurable technological progress during the Dark Ages, especially in agriculture, building, and weaponry.
Magic
The people of the time were superstitious by modern standards, but they followed the Greek belief that such things as astrology and alchemy had a rational basis. Belief in witches and other forms of malignant magic survived from pagan times, but attitudes toward those beliefs varied. There were occasional prosecutions, but St. Caesarius of Arles (d. 543) used his episcopal authority to prevent the prosecution of accused witches, on the grounds that no man could interfere with God’s power over nature; hence there was no such thing as sorcery. Boniface also warned that to believe in witches was un-Christian.
Monastic Learning
The early monks rejected classical civilization as pagan, thus the preservation of learning was not originally part of their task. But they had to teach Latin in order to prepare novices for the liturgy and the Bible, and this led to an interest in the whole spectrum of ancient learning. Many works by ancient writers are lost, but virtually all that survive come down in manuscripts industriously found, collected, and copied in monastic libraries during the Dark Ages.
The Bible
Jerome’s Vulgate, which Alcuin was learned enough to correct in some places, was in universal use in the West, although the name that it bore no longer applied, because Latin was now the language only of the educated. Alcuin undertook to correlate its various manuscript versions and to have copies made for others, at a time when even some bishops did not have a complete Bible, which required the hides of over fifty calves. Numerous biblical commentaries were written, some for laymen. Besides hagiography, monks also compiled dictionaries and encyclopediae and wrote histories of their own times and earlier eras, a practice that continued to be a monastic specialty for the next thousand years.
Spain
Visigothic Spain was the intellectual center of Western Catholicism in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it preserved some knowledge of the ancient classics. Isidore of Seville was perhaps the most learned man of his age, and synods of Spanish bishops were the first to condemn Western Arianism. Spanish influence spread to Ireland and England and from there to France, which became the center of anti-Arian theology. In England, a vernacular Christian literature developed, especially at Lindisfarne. St. Bede the Venerable (d. 735), a monk of Jarrow, an offshoot of Lindisfarne, wrote a history of the Anglo-Saxons and had some knowledge of Greek, which allowed him to translate the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon and to transmit knowledge of the Eastern Fathers.
The Court of Charlemagne
Charlemagne’s court was the center of a significant cultural renaissance, and, even though the Carolingian Empire was short-lived, its culture was enduring. Charlemagne’s support of learning was part of his general program of religious revitalization. He enticed Alcuin, who was originally from Lindisfarne, to settle at his court, established a palace school where both clerics and laymen were educated, and encouraged the founding of monastic and cathedral schools throughout his empire. Charlemagne showed his respect for learning by himself struggling to read and write, at a time when most princes regarded those skills as best left to clerks. The court of Charlemagne revolutionized Western literacy, introducing punctuation and spaces between words, for example, and a kind of script that was so clear that it became the model for most later handwriting.
Alcuin
Alcuin loved the poetry of Virgil but found it so seductive that he forbade his pupils to read it. But, drawing on the theories of Cassiodorus and others, he laid the foundation of medieval learning by establishing a curriculum based on the “three ways” (trivium) of logic, grammar, and rhetoric and the “four ways” (quadrivium) of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The first sought for truth in words and the second in mathematical relationships, with both together making up what came to be called the liberal arts, because they freed the student from ignorance.
Theology
The Augustinian Heritage
There was some original theological and philosophical activity in the West during the Dark Ages, but virtually the entire body of Christian doctrine came down through the prism of Augustine, a man who, except for the Scriptures themselves, influenced the course of Catholicism more than any other person in history.
Pseudo-Dionysius
During the sixth century, certain writings from the East were attributed to St. Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Acts recorded as having been converted at Athens by St. Paul and who in the West was later identified with Dionysius (Denis), the first bishop of Paris. When this alleged authorship was eventually discredited, the writer became known as Pseudo-Dionysius, but his theology continued to have great influence for over a thousand years.
Mysticism
The Dionysian works were the first extensive exposition of Christian mysticism, the seeds of which lay in Paul’s account of a man (presumably himself) who was taken out of himself and into Heaven. Dionysius described the mystical state as an exalted kind of prayer in which the soul utterly transcends the limits of human existence. The world of appearances conceals but also partly reveals the real world of the spirit, the transcendent realm.
The Divine Hierarchy
In Neo-Platonic terms, Pseudo-Dionysius’ preferred name for God was “The One”. Light is the ultimate metaphor for God but, paradoxically, precisely because of the brightness of that light, sinful men cannot see it. Light descends from God throughout the cosmos, fragmenting as it descends and thereby establishing a chain of being that stretches from the One to the lowest of creatures, all arranged in harmony according to the divine plan. Souls preexist with the angels but are plunged into bodies, where they can have only fleeting glimpses of truth but can discover the route by which reality descends and are thereby enabled to reascend to the heavenly realm.
Pseudo-Dionysius used the term hierarchy (“the rule of priests”) for this cosmic order coming from on high, and he taught that the visible hierarchy of the Church mirrors the angelic hierarchy of eight distinct choirs (thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim) even as those angels’ unceasing worship of God is mirrored in the liturgy. Thus the Neo-Platonic theory of the universe as a hierarchy of beings emanating downward from one ultimate source, and returning to that source by the same way, explained the hierarchical nature of society, where each person has an assigned place under the ultimate authority of pope and emperor.
Negative Theology
Knowledge of God is innate in men, because the existence of imperfect beings implies the existence of a perfect Being from whom they derive their limited perfections. Pseudo-Dionysius’ “negative theology” taught that, since God is absolutely One, no categories can ultimately be applied to Him. There is no time in God, and, although He foresees all things, He does not diminish human freedom, because He foresees human actions precisely as free.
Boethius
St. Severinus Boethius (d. ca. 524), an imperial official born into a prominent Roman family, was the last flowering of classical culture in the West and one of the most influential thinkers of the Dark Ages and the ensuing centuries. He knew Greek well, translated some of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and made exploratory efforts at solving some of the questions that would engage later philosophers. As knowledge of Greek disappeared in the West, scholars took almost all their knowledge of ancient philosophy from Boethius, including especially Aristotle’s system of logic.
Under Neo-Platonic influence, Boethius defined theology as the study of beings that exist outside matter and physics—beings that can be studied through the trivium—while the study of beings inseparable from matter was pursued through the mathematicalquadrivium. Boethius affirmed the Greco-Roman idea of impersonal and inescapable destiny, but it could be overcome by submission to God’s will. Human life is symbolized by the wheel of fortune, on which all men have a place but which rotates unpredictably, laying low the mighty and elevating the lowly.
Boethius taught that the cultivation of virtue is the practical purpose of philosophy, an idea that, in his highly influential book The Consolations of Philosophy, was tested in a way that philosophical theories seldom are—he wrote it in prison while awaiting execution because of a complex political-religious intrigue. Over the next thousand years, it remained one of the most widely read books in all of Christendom. Although based heavily on Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, with few overt Christian references,Consolations was suffused by a Christian spirit. It affirmed the purifying value of suffering and the transitoriness of the world and was the source of much of the medieval idea of the relationship between free will and divine providence.
Gregory the Great
Gregory the Great came to be designated as one of the four founding doctors (teachers) of the Western church, along with Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. In his practical theology, he struggled to shore up the moral and spiritual basis of civilization, besides being one of the most important of all the popes and the first to use the paradoxical title “servant of the servants of God”. He incorporated some of the principles of the Penitentials in his book Pastoral Care, which emphasized conversion as the primary purpose of penance, analyzed the motives of particular sins, and treated subjective intention as relevant to the degree of guilt.
Purgatory
Although earlier theologians had speculated about the idea of a temporary period of punishment following death, Gregory was the first to give full expression to the doctrine of Purgatory, including the Mass as a sacrifice that could be offered on behalf of deceased souls. (The idea of a plenary [full] indulgence—the remission of all temporal punishment due to past sins—dates from the eighth century.)
The Contemplative Life
Gregory articulated the distinction between the active and contemplative life that became fundamental to Catholic spirituality, designating contemplation—a life devoted to prayer and meditation on the divine mysteries—as superior but insisting that a life of charity toward others, of fidelity to divinely ordained responsibilities, is a prerequisite. This was not simply a distinction between monks and others, since each person can live contemplatively in accordance with his state of life. Gregory, also influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius, described God as “boundless light”, drawing the soul to itself to the point of causing it to forget even its own identity. Man longs for a vision of God, and occasional glimpses are possible, but for the most part man can only know God through images.
Eriugena
John Scotus (“the Scot”) Eriugena (d. 877) was an Irishman who taught in France, bringing with him what little knowledge of Greek still survived in his native land. He too translated Greek philosophical works and considered philosophy, especially dialectic (logic), necessary for believers, because the divine commands can be obeyed only insofar as they are understood. The concept of being—that an idea in the mind represents something that really exists—was central to his thought, as it would be to later medieval philosophers. But influenced also by Pseudo-Dionysius’ negative theology, Eriugena taught that, in a sense, nonbeing must also be attributed to God, because He can never be adequately understood in human terms.
The Neo-Platonic Hierarchy
Also as with Pseudo-Dionysius, the universe for Eriugena was a hierarchy of Neo-Platonic Ideas linking God and the world, Ideas that are eternal, in that God created them outside time. Because ultimate reality is One, multiplicity in the world is the result of sin. The Divine Word contains the seeds of all beings, a process of creation guided by the Holy Spirit in which each individual being is a symbol of an unseen spiritual Idea that is more real than itself, so that amidst the multiplicity of creation the mind can know the ultimate unity of God.
The world is not a prison for the soul but the place where the soul begins its return journey to God. Souls never completely forget God and come close to Him to the degree that they are not bodily, that they have knowledge of Him through direct divine illumination. Death marks the transition from division to unity, as the resurrected body is reabsorbed first by the soul, then by the Idea from which it originally emanated, and finally receives direct knowledge of Wisdom itself.
Influence of Eriugena
Eriugena’s system was the most ambitious effort to date to forge a comprehensive synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine—the ultimate reconciliation of faith and reason—and as such might have established itself as the dominant Catholic way of thought. But in the disordered days of the ninth century, Eriugena was little understood, and his influence remained limited.
Heresies
The late Dark Ages were a time of considerable theological ferment. The semi-Arian heresy of Adoptionism—that, while Christ was divine, the human Jesus was only the adopted son of the Father—reappeared in Spain in the eighth century, possibly influenced by the Islamic denial that God could become man. It was condemned by Pope Hadrian I (772-795). For the next three centuries, the most important theological work took place in Frankish or German monasteries.
The Virgin Birth
While the doctrine of Christ’s virgin birth was always accepted, there was disagreement as to how it occurred. Ratramnus (d. ca. 868) held that His birth took place in the ordinary human way, while another monk, Paschasius Radbertus (d. 860), taught that Jesus had miraculously emerged from the womb through “closed doors”.
The Real Presence
The Eucharist had always been regarded as the Body of Christ, but without much discussion of precisely how that was so. Ratramnus distinguished Christ’s spiritual Body from His physical Body and held that He is present “figuratively” in the Eucharist, which is a memorial of His sacrifice on the Cross. (Eriugena held a similar belief.) In response, Radbertus set forth the first developed theory of the Real Presence, insisting that Christ’s Body, as received by the faithful in the Eucharist, is the same Body that was borne by Mary and died on the Cross.
Liturgical Change
The defense of the Real Presence led to a number of new liturgical practices: heightened emphasis on the consecration as the moment when bread and wine became Christ’s Body and Blood; the use of unleavened bread, to prevent crumbs; the practice of giving the laity unbroken hosts, for the same reason; allowing only clergy to touch the consecrated host and the sacred vessels; and the confession “Lord, I am not worthy” before Communion. Both consecrated elements were affirmed to be the Body of Christ wholly and entirely, and gradually the chalice ceased being offered to the laity. The heresy of Ratramnus led also to the practice of receiving Communion on the tongue while kneeling, a posture that in the Old Testament was the spontaneous action of those who found themselves in the presence of God. (The priest, acting for Christ, frequently genuflected [“knee bending”], but did not kneel.)
Infrequent Communion
Bede and others had advocated even daily Communion, but, as the sense of unworthiness grew, the reception of Communion by the laity became less and less frequent, to the point where it became necessary to require minimal reception—first at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, later reduced to Easter only. As only a few people approached the holy table on a given day, Communion was often distributed after Mass, when almost everyone had left, although it was considered meritorious merely to be in the presence of the eucharistic Christ, without receiving Him. Many people thought that it was necessary to go to confession before each Communion, and possibly to abstain from meat for a week, so that even nuns often received Communion only a few times a year, while the priest’s sense of his own unworthiness was sometimes rendered acute by his regular celebration of Mass.
Marian Piety
Marian piety developed during the Carolingian period, much of it imported from the East but having a dynamic of its own. On the basis of ancient traditions, Mary’s Assumption and her Immaculate Conception were widely but not universally believed, the Assumption regarded as necessary because Mary had been elevated above sinful mankind and therefore could not die.
Grace and Free Will
In the ninth century, a controversy again erupted over the relationship between grace and free will, a question Augustine had only partially resolved. Some of the disputants affirmed that men enjoy a natural freedom that allows them to respond to God’s offer of faith, while others considered men free only to do evil, in accord with their sinful natures, thus making them totally dependent on grace. To the former, good works were meritorious, while to the latter they were not.
A basic issue was the mystery of God’s sovereign power. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims (d. 882), explained that God remains sovereign because from all eternity He foresees men’s free decisions and incorporates them into His providence. But Ratramnus thought that belief in human merit took salvation out of God’s hands and allowed men to determine their own fates and that, if God accepted good works as evidence of repentance, He would be changing His mind—first condemning, then justifying. Instead, therefore, He must decree men’s fates from all eternity.
The German monk Gottschalk (d. 868), who was associated with Ratramnus, was imprisoned for holding that God hardens some people’s hearts and withholds His grace from them, thereby making it impossible for them to choose good and predestining them to Hell. Gottschalk thought that Christ could not have died for all men, since He would then have wasted some of His precious Blood. Predestinarians like Gottschalk held that Christ died “for many”, while Hincmar insisted that He died “for all”, in the sense that His grace is available to all who accept it.
Liturgy
In a sense, the greatest cultural achievement of the Dark Ages was the liturgy, which was then given the basic form that it would retain for centuries.
The Power of Symbol
Barbarian culture was intensely communal and did not encourage interiority, so that the solemn and dramatic celebration of the sacred rites impressed the barbarians and taught them their faith more effectively than formal instruction. The Frankish clergy were especially sensitive to the dramatic power of ritual and symbol and added various genuflections, signs of the cross, and other gestures to the liturgy. In accordance with ancient rhetorical practice, repetitions, especially triple repetitions, were used to achieve emphasis.
Sacred Art
The barbarians lacked art in the traditional sense, some of their attempts at sacred pictures being quite crude. But their booty of gold and jewels led them to develop skills as jewelers, which they lavished on crucifixes and sacred vessels, as well as on the most elaborately illustrated manuscripts ever produced, a practice that was, paradoxically, perhaps linked to illiteracy: the book was a mysterious sacred object, venerated even by those who could not understand its contents.
Disputed Practices
The distinction between doctrine and discipline, a difference over “externals” were often treated as fundamental, because it was thought that there should be unity of practice. Thus when the two branches of English Christianity came together at the Synod of Whitby (664) the northerners accepted the Roman practice both for the date of Easter and for the clerical tonsure (“hair”).
The tonsure was a prime example of how externals revealed the world of the spirit. Since hair is a principal focus of fashion and personal vanity, the desert monks let theirs grow wild and uncombed; the Roman tonsure cut most of it off, leaving only a narrow circle around a bald pate; and the Celtic tonsure shaved the front half of the head but let the back half grow long, a sign that the monk had relinquished his status as a warrior. Nuns’ heads were symbolically shaved when they took their vows.
The Cross
The cross became the dominant Christian symbol during the Dark Ages, surpassing earlier themes such as the Good Shepherd and the Pantocrator image that was never common in the West. Originally, the cross was bare, to signify the Resurrection, but devotion to the image of the crucified Christ developed during the seventh century, as the faithful were reminded of their great sins that had crucified their Savior and were urged to share His sufferings. (The Reproaches [“O my people, how have I offended thee?”] became part of the Good Friday liturgy.)
Images
Some people—monks in particular—objected to the number and variety of images, but the practice was defended partly on Old Testament grounds: the image of a serpent erected by Moses in the desert, which protected the Israelites from real serpents.
The Liturgical Cycle
The liturgy had two overlapping temporal cycles. That of the seasons began with Advent and moved forward through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, the Ascension, and Pentecost, while in the cycle of the saints practically every day of the year commemorated one or more saints, usually the days of their deaths, hence of their entries into Heaven. Feasts of the saints, including those of the Virgin Mary, steadily increased in number, the Assumption (also Dormition or “sleep”), the Annunciation, and the Purification being introduced into the West in the seventh century. In a sense, there was no such thing as secular time. A town, for example, would schedule a trade fair not on September 29 but on “Michaelmas”. People lived primarily in sacred time, in accord with a calendar that commemorated the life of Christ and of His saints on particular days.
Pagan Survivals
But the Church won only a partial victory over pagan time. The new year was March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, when the Son of God entered human history, but the Roman Kalends—January 1—was also observed. The custom of dating the years from the birth of Christ was not established until the sixth century, and even then the older system, based on the founding of Rome, continued in some places. Just as some Roman deities remained in the calendar, northern pagan deities were still commemorated, if gradually forgotten, in the days of the week named for the gods Tiw (Tuesday), Woden (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday), and Fridd (Friday). In England, the day of Christ’s Resurrection adopted the name of the pagan feast of Easter and the period before Easter the name of a spring feast called Lent. Yule, a winter feast, became a name for Christmas.
Votive Masses
Votive (“vow”) masses—celebrations not in observance of Sunday or some great feast but offered for the special intentions of the faithful—dated from the late fifth century in the West. Their texts varied to some degree according to their purposes, masses for the dead being by far the most common. Since they were considered acts of private devotion, stipends (Latin for “wages”) were offered to the officiating priest.
The Divine Office
The celebration of the complete liturgy—the Opus Dei (“work of God”)—was the monks’ principal task, taking up much of their day, so that they prayed in the name of the whole Church, fulfilling Christ’s command to pray always, offering to God the unceasing praise owed Him by His creatures. The Psalms, understood as referring to Christ, were the substance of the Divine Office, which was chanted at fixed hours throughout the day: Matins (“Morning”), Lauds (“Praise”), Prime (“First”), Terce (“Third”), Sext (“Sixth”), None (“Ninth”), Vespers (“Evening”), and Compline (“Completion”). The hours of the Divine Office regulated the monastic day and, in the absence of clocks, that of the whole surrounding community, through the ringing of the church bells.
Change
Liturgical chant came to be called Gregorian after the great pope, although it actually predated his reign. Boethius, drawing on Platonic Ideas, provided a theological justification for sacred music as an expression of the divine harmony of the universe itself. The see of Rome was conservative in this as in other ways, not adopting chant until the eighth century and for a long time forbidding hymns that were not directly biblical.
Prayer
Prayers directed to Christ were rare in the liturgy, with most prayers being formulated, “O God. . . through Jesus Christ Our Lord”. But the Western church began to insist on the formula, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son . . .” in the Doxology rather than the Eastern “through the Son”, which the West deemed open to Arian misunderstandings. Opposition to Arianism also led to a heightened devotion to the Trinity, now addressed in its unity as well as in the three Persons. The invocation of the Trinity was placed at the beginning of the Litany of the Saints, and private prayers commonly began with the sign of the cross and the declaration, “In the name of the Father. . .”. Images of the Trinity became common, with the Father for the first time portrayed in human form, as an elderly patriarch with a white beard.
The Sacrifice of the Mass
Above all the Mass was understood as the continuation of the sacrifice of Calvary as the means of redemption, of which the repeated sign of the cross throughout the liturgy served as a reminder, as did associating the priest’s act with the sacrifices of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek.
In contrast to the Eastern sense of the liturgy as an entry into eternity, the Western liturgy increasingly celebrated the historical events of Christ’s life. The ritual of the Mass was sometimes interpreted in that way, with the priest’s moving from one side of the altar to the other, for example, as symbolizing Jesus’ being taken back and forth between Herod and Pilate.
The Ordinary and the Proper
The Mass itself was divided into the Ordinary (those prayers that never changed, especially the Canon, which included the Consecration) and the Proper (“belonging” to a particular feast), which included the entrance hymn, petitionary prayers, Scripture readings, Offertory prayers, Secret, Preface, Communion, and post-Communion prayers appropriate to the feast.
The Frankish Liturgy
As early as the fifth century, the Gallic liturgy had absorbed certain Eastern influences, such as elaborate processions, the Kyrie, the Creed, Marian feasts, and a penchant for lengthy prayers. In the West, liturgical leadership passed to the Franks by default, because of the disordered conditions that prevailed at Rome. Alcuin made an adaptation of the Roman liturgy that retained certain of the Eastern innovations, was mandated for use throughout Charlemagne’s empire, and was later readopted by Rome. For the first time, there was a universal liturgy, although a few relatively slight local variations survived, mainly in certain religious orders.
Contrition
Over time, the processional chants that expressed the participants’ sense of unworthiness, their need to be purified, went from being personal prayers recited quietly by the priest to formal prayers said by him inaudibly at the foot of the altar (“Judge me, O God”), including the Confiteor (“I confess”), with the ancient custom of striking one’s breast as an acknowledgment of sin. With the introduction of these preliminary prayers, the Introit (“entrance”) no longer served as the processional hymn but became simply the first prayer said by the priest after reaching the altar.
Special Prayers
The Frankish liturgy offered prayers for the pope and various other categories of people, including those for whom a particular Mass was being offered. For a time, the petitions offered during the Canon were quite specific—a wedding anniversary, illness, prayers to become pregnant—but around 600 they were restricted to general terms. Except in Masses explicitly for that purpose, the dead were for a long time not commemorated in the liturgy, since such commemoration was considered to be the private concern of the mourners. In the early centuries, the prayers of petition were composed by the celebrant, but in the sixth century, a limited number were gathered together (“collects”) and made official. Certain occasional hymns, such as the “Veni Creator” (Come, Creator Spirit) on Pentecost, became an integral part of particular liturgies, sung in response to the readings.
Readings
Over time, the three lessons, one of them from the Old Testament, were reduced to two, except on major feasts. The first reading usually came from one of Paul’s Letters and was thus called “The Epistle” even when it was not actually from a letter. The second was always from the Gospels and was proclaimed with great solemnity, with the priest praying to be made worthy and the worshippers signing the cross on their foreheads, lips, and hearts to signify their resolution to understand the Gospel, take it to heart, and proclaim it. Gospel books were often elaborately decorated and kept in jeweled caskets when not in use.
Nicene Creed
The Creed was part of the liturgy in the East as early as the fifth century, adopted in the West in the sixth, and mandated for general use by Charlemagne. In the eleventh century, the Church at Rome acceded to the request of the emperor St. Henry II (1002-1024) to adopt this Frankish custom, thereby making it universal. The Creed was followed by intercessory prayers for the Church, chanted by the deacon. Since by now almost everyone was baptized as an infant, the Liturgy of the Catechumens was no longer considered distinct from the rest of the Mass, and no one was excluded.
Offertory
The laity continued to bring their offerings to church on Sunday, but their gifts were now often received and stored before Mass and eventually were supplanted by monetary collections and the tithe, so that the clergy alone brought forward the bread and wine at the Offertory. A drop of water was poured into the wine of the chalice to symbolize mankind’s role in the work of salvation, a role that was real but that was overwhelmed by the power of Christ’s Blood.
The Canon
The injunction, “Pray, brethren”, originally addressed to the clergy, became the priest’s call to the laity to assist him in offering the holy sacrifice, followed by the Preface (not a preliminary but something sung “in front of” the people), in which the duties of worship and thanksgiving were acknowledged, and concluding with the Sanctus, which proclaimed that the sacrifice was offered in union with the saints and angels.
The priest then began praying the Canon (“rule” or prescribed rite) of the Mass, which in the Frankish lands was said inaudibly, a practice that was later made universal. It was a silence that constituted a kind of inner chamber where the priest, acting alone but supported by the prayers of the faithful, undertook the awesome task laid on him by his ordination, beseeching God to accept their offering and, because he and the people were unworthy, calling upon the angels to transport it to the altar of Heaven.
Consecration
At all other times, the priest acted in the name of the people, but at the Consecration, as he dared to utter the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, he acted as Christ Himself. In the Frankish liturgy, the elevation of the sacred elements at the end of the Canon was the first view of them granted to the faithful. Accompanied by the chanted proclamation, “Through Him, with Him, and in Him”, the priest announced that his consecratory task had been completed and that he was once again turning his attention to the congregation.
Communion
Whereas for centuries both priests and laity received Communion from a single loaf of bread, broken according to Christ’s command, by the later ninth century, the laity were being given small individual hosts, and the priest’s host alone was ritually broken, using only unleavened bread that was baked in monasteries. Beginning around 700, the hymn “Lamb of God”, calling on Jesus as the sacrificial victim, was sung by the congregation at the point of the breaking of the host, the adoption of another Eastern practice.
Greeting of Peace
The “kiss of peace” was a stylized embrace between two people, beginning with the celebrant, a gesture in which the higher ranking of the two placed his head briefly on each shoulder of the recipient, who then took the greeting to the next person in the hierarchy. For a time, the laity participated—men and women separately—but eventually the ritual was limited to the clergy. In most places, the kiss was exchanged at the beginning of the Eucharist, but at Rome and in North Africa it occurred before Communion.
Post-Communion
People often drank a little wine or water after receiving Communion, in order to prevent the sacred species in their mouths from being unintentionally dribbled out. After Communion, the priest carefully purified both the sacred vessels and his own fingers, and each church had a piscina (“pool”), an underground depository into which the water from the various purifications was drained, to prevent its being mingled with waste.
Private Masses
For a long time, the unity of each local community had to be fulfilled in a communal Mass in which everyone participated. But “low masses”, without procession or music and sometimes with only a priest and an acolyte, were eventually permitted, since the Mass was not only a communal act of worship but a divine action that bestowed grace on the faithful even when they were not present. This in turn led to the erection of side altars in larger churches (almost fifty in one German church), so that eventually more than one Mass might be celebrated at the same time. The Mass was not only a communal act of worship but a divine action that bestowed grace on the faithful even if they were not present.
The Altar
Conventionally, the high altar was situated at the point where the long east-west nave (“ship”) met the shorter north-south transept (“crossing”), so that the congregation might be gathered on three sides of the altar, albeit some distance away. In time, however, a greatly enlarged altar was more frequently placed in the apse—the semi-circular chapel at the rear of the sanctuary—thereby removing it even farther from the congregation. Increasingly, an altar screen—a practice taken from both the Jewish Temple and the Byzantine ikonostasis (“image screen”)—separated the sanctuary from the congregation in many churches, although the West did not go as far as the Eastern practice of concealing the altar from the sight of the people. Often a small altar was erected in front of the screen for the faithful to assist at daily Mass.
Piety in Practice
Pilgramages
Pilgrimages and the veneration of relics continued to be popular, but the Muslim conquest of the Near East all but ended trips to the Holy Land, and the perilous conditions of travel everywhere caused the faithful to turn increasingly to the shrines of local saints. Beginning in the fifth century, the remains of the martyrs were often taken from their graves and re-interred within the altars of churches, until eventually it was thought necessary that every altar contain a relic.
Penitentials
The Irish monks drew up books called Penitentials (“penance books”), elaborating a severe discipline that was also applied to the laity—identifying particular sins, offering guidance for dealing with them, and prescribing appropriate penances. Even though these monks were considered overly severe in their penances (half a year of fasting on bread and water, for example, or lifelong chastity for a married couple), their manuals came to be widely used on the Continent, partly because of their precise delineation of the types and seriousness of sins and appropriate penances. The manuals helped to establish a unified moral teaching throughout the Western church and were used in parts of the East as well.
Private Confession
In time, this led to the practice of private confession by lay people, a custom that had previously been observed only at the time of death. At first, church officials were wary of the practice, but eventually they began to express misgivings about public confession instead and urged the practice of frequent confession on the laity, with an emphasis on the interior spiritual state, with the confessor acting as a physician of souls who prescribed painful but salutary remedies.
By the ninth century, private confession for lay people was required at least once a year, along with a whole new penitential discipline, including the silence of the confessor (the “seal of confession”) so absolute that if, for example, he learned from a penitent of a plot on his own life, he could do nothing to thwart it. (St. John Nepomucen [d. 1393], confessor to the queen of Bohemia, was drowned by order of the king, for refusing to divulge the contents of her confession.)
Blessings
Over time, the Church sanctioned numerous blessings for specific purposes—for healing, for going on a journey, following childbirth, for a good harvest, for various worldly crafts—some of which, especially those related to physical nature, lay on the borderline between Christian prayer and lurking old superstitions. Often people made bargains with God, promising certain things—to build a church, to go on pilgrimage—if God would grant their requests.
Marriage
Both the Romans and the barbarians regarded consent as necessary for marriage, but it was the consent of the two families. The Church, on the other hand, required the consent of the marital couple themselves, and sexual consummation was considered necessary to ratify a marriage. By the ninth century, marriage ceremonies under church auspices were becoming common, although often conducted only at the church door or in the vestibule, which was constructed primarily for that purpose. The couple joined their right hands, crowns were placed on their heads, and they received a blessing. Following the example of Tobias in the Old Testament, the newlyweds were then urged to refrain from sexual relations for a certain period following the ceremony.
The Church’s prohibition of marriage between close relatives, including in-laws, encountered strong resistance for centuries, because marriage was a way of cementing and enhancing family status, and powerful men thought they should be free to do whatever was advantageous.
Death
The Christian understanding of death came to express itself in ways that would endure for well over a thousand years. The hour of death was crucial, when angels and devils competed for the soul of the dying person, who, attended by a priest, was called upon to repent his sinful life. Important people, especially ecclesiastics, were buried in churches, in increasingly large and elaborate tombs. But most people were buried in unmarked graves in cemeteries attached to churches, and, as a burial ground became full, their decayed bodies were exhumed and the bones piled up in a “charnel [flesh] house”, also near the church, to make room for others.
A Seedtime
The Dark Ages was a time of great destruction, profound pessimism, and almost inconceivable catastrophes, when the prospect of eternity was very real and the Church alone provided hope. But, although few people could see it at the time, it was also the seedtime of a new civilization. With the disappearance of the Roman Empire, the West was thrown back upon itself, forced by circumstances to develop its own distinctive civilization, a new synthesis forged out of Christianity, the political tradition of Rome, and Greek culture. The tension between Christianity and the barbarian cultures was the principal source of a new dynamic energy, the breakdown of the old being necessary for the creation of something new, which was primarily a spiritual unity forged by the Church.
The Year 1000
The year 1000 seemed to many people to be the appropriately symbolic date for the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. But when, allowing for the variant calendars in use in different places, the year 1000 was safely passed, Christians understood that the duration of human history might be long indeed.
Sylvester II
Pope Gregory VI died in 999, amid rumors of poison. Emperor Otto III (983-1002) then arranged the election of his former tutor Gerbert, the French archbishop of Ravenna, as Sylvester II (999-1003). Gerbert was the most learned man of the age, having studied in Spain and imbibed advanced Muslim science and mathematics as well as the conventional liberal arts, introduced Arabic numerals into Christian Europe, and reportedly invented the abacus and the pendulum clock. Whatever Otto may have intended, Sylvester’s election seemed to promise that the second Christian millennium would be a time of genuine rebirth.