6

Christendom

Recovery

The year 1000 does serve conveniently to mark the beginning of the end of the Dark Ages. The history of medieval¹ society is to a great extent the history of endless small wars and rebellions fought for limited goals. Massacres, assassinations, and the torture of enemies were still not uncommon, but overall it was a less disordered and violent time than the Dark Ages.

Just as the previous decline had been a series of falling dominoes set in motion by the collapse of the Roman state, so the recovery was due mainly to the growth of centralized states under strong kings, who, although they by no means put an end to random violence and frequent wars, nonetheless were able to achieve a level of stability and security unknown since Roman times. The revival of the state in turn made possible an economic revival, major signs of which were the systematic opening up of new lands, indicating significant population growth, and the revival of urban life, indicating a revival of trade. This in turn made possible the revival of cultural and intellectual life.

The Ideal of Society

Despite continuous internal conflict, medieval people believed in the idea of a unified Christendom based on Augustine’s idea of the two cities, an exalted view of a universal society that came closest to realization during the thirteenth century, not because the faith was then perfectly lived but because all aspects of life were consciously oriented toward Christian beliefs. It was an age of contradictions—cruelty and charity, beauty and squalor—but in no other age did Christianity achieve such complete expression.

The Social Hierarchy

Men of all ranks were part of a larger community, a hierarchical organism that transcended the boundaries of individual kingdoms. Every person and institution had a divinely ordained place in a graduated series of communities, each with its own sphere and authority, all of them intended to work harmoniously together. A twelfth-century monk divided society into three groups: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the nobility), and those who worked (everyone else, especially the peasants, who were perhaps eighty percent of the population).

Inequalities

This structure was seen as decreed by God; although changes could and did occur, there was no concept of sweeping social reform except among extreme millenarians, and even they expected radical change to occur entirely through God’s action, not man’s. Inequality, suffering, and injustice were regarded as natural effects of the Fall, to be alleviated as far as possible by individual acts of charity and by wise rulers. Social classes were fixed but not rigid, especially in the Church, where the majority of the higher clergy were probably of high birth but men of humble origins could rise in an institution that rewarded merit and did not recognize family dynasties.

Serfdom

Most bishoprics and monasteries owned serfs. The freeing of serfs was not a religious requirement but was regarded as meritorious. The insistence that serfs had souls and could be saved made their condition vastly better than that of slaves in ancient times. They were allowed to join Crusades (and received their freedom if they did so) and could become priests with their lord’s permission. Marriages of serfs were valid even without such permission, and the child of one free parent was himself born free.

Jews

Jews had a unique position in medieval society. Because they had never been Christians, they were not considered heretics, but their situation was extremely precarious. The medieval view was that because they had willfully rejected Christ (the “perfidious Jew” of the Good Friday liturgy), they had earned the wrath of God and hence deserved to be under the rule of Christians. They were forbidden to own land, belong to guilds, or hold any kind of office—all of which would give them authority over Christians. Often they had to wear distinctive clothes and live in their own “ghettoes”, and periodically their property was confiscated by kings or lords. During the Middle Ages, they were expelled from most of the countries of Europe at one time or another, the Papal States being the principal exception, although they were sometimes later readmitted.

Augustine and other theologians argued against the killing of Jews, since it was God’s purpose that they should eventually be converted. Sometimes Jews were made to listen to sermons to persuade them of the truth of Christianity, and attempts were made to suppress the Talmud—the rabbinical commentary on Scripture—in the expectation that without those commentaries the Jews would see that the Bible foretold the coming of Christ. Beginning with Gregory the Great, a number of popes also officially condemned violence against the Jews. But they were subject to various kinds of harassment, mob violence, and false accusations of crime, often abetted by civil or ecclesiastical authorities, made scapegoats for such things as plagues and fires, and envied for their real or imagined wealth. Even into modern times, there was recurrent popular hysteria over the rumored kidnapping, torture, and murder of Christian children as part of Jewish ritual (“blood libel”), a hysteria that was always followed by the killing of Jews. Various popes denounced such stories as a fanciful misunderstanding of the Jewish religion.

A Pervasive Faith

The salvation of souls was the supreme good that outweighed all others, so that the Catholic faith was to suffuse every dimension of existence: morality, family life, social customs, art, economics, law, and government. The entire culture was organized in such a way that at every turn people were reminded of divine realities and drawn toward them. Thus church spires were the tallest structures in every town, and churches and outdoor shrines were everywhere. The hours of the day, announced by church bells, were organized according to the Divine Office, and the year was organized according to the liturgical feasts that reenacted the cycle of Christ’s life and that of His saints.

The Common Good

In theory, the ruler had authority only for the purpose of ensuring the good of all, which made that authority patriarchal. Positions of authority were based on social rank but ideally motivated by a desire to promote the common good. There was no separation of church and state in the modern sense, but there was a distinction between the two such that, paradoxically, the very idea of Christendom, because of its intimate unity of spiritual and temporal authority, made Church-state conflict inevitable.

Divine and Human Law

The law of God that governed the universe was assumed to be visible in His creation and accessible to human reason. But because of the Fall, “positive” laws of church and state (those “posited” or “put in place” by authority) were also necessary. Just laws were not so much made as discovered, since they were based on the law of God. But positive laws did not simply apply divine law directly. Not everything that was immoral was illegal; prudence had to be employed in making human law reflect the divine. The state had its own sphere as the temporal organ of Christendom, possessing its own authority in those things that did not pertain to salvation.² The Church, however, had the ultimate authority to determine what did and did not pertain to salvation.

The Two Seeds

John of Salisbury (d. 1180), an influential exponent of political theory, held that both the spiritual and the temporal swords belonged to the Church, which then granted temporal power to the state. Following ancient precedent, John even justified tyrannicide—the killing of a wicked and unjust ruler—and civil rebellion when it was sanctioned by the Church.

St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the most influential medieval thinker, affirmed monarchy as the best political system but insisted that the monarch had to act in accordance with natural law. In some medieval coronation rites, the king bound himself by an oath to obey the law, thereby seeming to recognize the conditional character of royal authority. But the meaning of Charlemagne’s coronation remained ambiguous: Had the Pope conferred the imperial office on him or merely recognized it? Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (“red-bearded”, 1152-1190) was the first to call himself Holy Roman Emperor, thereby asserting that his authority came directly from God, but emperors still wanted to be crowned by the pope.

Sacral Monarchy

In being solemnly crowned by the Church, monarchs partook of some kind of divine character. The emperor actually became a canon of St. Peter’s in Rome, in which capacity he could wear deacon’s vestments and chant the Gospel at Mass. In France and England, the ritual of coronation included anointing with oils, which in France were said to have been brought from Heaven by angels. Kings had miraculous powers by which they could heal “the king’s evil” (scrofula) with a touch.

Roman Law

The revival of Roman law supported imperial claims, with theoreticians of the Holy Roman Empire holding that the power of the state is derived directly from God and that the monarch is therefore answerable to no one but God. Some papalists claimed that the ruler ultimately has to be answerable to his subjects, but some imperialists adapted that argument to make the pope answerable to the members of the Church.

The Empire

The idea of Christendom seemed to require that, just as there was only one flock and one shepherd, so also there ought to be only one state, so that the existence of a number of independent kingdoms was merely accepted, not considered ideal. The great poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321), who was also a political theorist, longed for the unification of his beloved Italy and saw the emperor as the only agency capable of bringing this about. The emperor, like God, functioned as the universal lawgiver, unifying mankind into one world state based on natural law. Although deeply devout, Dante held that the Church should enjoy no temporal authority.

Reform

Imperial Initiative

Sylvester II’s pontificate was too brief to implement a sustained reform program. Both he and Otto III were driven out of Rome, and after Sylvester’s death, the Italian nobility once again gained control of the papal elections. But the spirit of reform was in the air, and for a century, movements for change struggled against entrenched interests, as reform gradually triumphed. A majority of the popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were either monks or canons, which meant that to some extent they had risen in the Church independent of the hierarchy of politically appointed bishops. But in order to overcome the influence of the rapacious Italian families, reform popes could only be put on the throne through the influence of the emperor, and when that failed, the results were disastrous—Benedict IX (1032-1048), for example, was elected pope while in his twenties and later resigned on condition that he be given back the money he had used to bribe his election.

Leo IX

Emperor Henry III (1039-1056) deposed one pope and forced the election of three others in short succession, including his kinsman St. Leo IX (1049-1054), who brought a coterie of reformers with him from Germany and became the real founder of the reform movement. Leo restored the freedom of papal elections, forbade the clergy to be involved in violence, and castigated them for oppressing the poor. On one occasion, he demanded that a council of bishops confess publicly whether they were guilty of simony, and on the spot, he deposed those who were.

But at the end of his pontificate, Leo was taken prisoner by yet another rising secular power—the Normans, who were making territorial claims on Sicily and southern Italy—and papal independence remained precarious. Henry III appointed the next pope, Victor II (1055-1057), in the last papal election under imperial control, but the regents for the boy-emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) tried to depose the reformer Alexander II (1061-1073). Imperial armies marched on Rome and were thwarted only by a rebellion in Germany that required their immediate return.

The College of Cardinals

In order to diminish princely influence, Nicholas II (1059-1061) gave the College of Cardinals sole authority to elect the pope, and Alexander III (1159-1181) required a two-thirds majority The cardinals (“hinges”) were originally the leading Roman clergy but by now were primarily the members of the papal Curia. There were three ranks—bishops, priests, and deacons—but membership in the Sacred College was extremely small by modern standards, as low as six on occasion. Conclaves (“with keys”, because the cardinals were locked in) tended to drag on, because of factionalism, causing various popes to require the electors to live under straitened circumstances: one small cell, one servant, and a meager diet. Medieval popes were usually Italians, although at various times French, German, English, and Portuguese prelates were chosen. By no means were all cardinals at the time of their elections, and a few were not even bishops.

Gregory VII

St. Gregory VII (Hildebrand, 1073-1085) was an Italian who had accompanied Leo IX from Germany and became himself one of the greatest of the popes, so that the crucial changes of the eleventh century came to be called the Gregorian or Hildebrandian Reform.

The Reform Program

The reformers identified two closely intertwined problems—the worldliness and corruption of the clergy and the control of lay lords over the Church, the second of which made the first almost impossible to correct. But the reform program was implemented only in fits and starts over a long time and was never completely achieved. By virtue of their offices, bishops were often intensely ambitious and powerful in both spiritual and secular terms, controlled great wealth, held high office in the state, and were continually involved in feudal alliances and plots.

Prince Bishops

The great theologian and monastic reformer St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) excoriated worldly prelates as successors of Constantine rather than of Peter. The notorious bishop Odo of Bayeux (d. 1097), the brother of William I the Conqueror of England (1066-1087) and Normandy, led his own armies in battle and, following the death of Gregory VII, prepared to march on Rome to seize the papacy for himself, a plan that his brother thwarted.

Celibacy

During the Dark Ages, many parish priests were married, but in the eleventh century, celibacy was made a universal discipline in the Western church, even to the point of decreeing that priests must send away their wives and children, although many continued to keep mistresses. Celibacy had been held in the highest esteem from the beginning of the Church, since the celibate, by his very life, reminded people of the Kingdom of God, where all worldly attachments, including families, would be transcended. But celibacy was imposed on the clergy also to prevent them from establishing family dynasties.

Benefices

As “benefices”, church offices were attractive investments that subordinated the welfare of the people to the interests of the patron. Technically, the bishop alone could appoint a pastor to a parish, but he often had to choose from nominees presented by a patron, who might be a layman, a monastery, or a cathedral chapter and who also claimed the tithes due to the priest. The reform popes kept a close watch on bishops, sometimes nullifying elections by cathedral chapters and appointing their own nominees instead. Chapters were often worldly, and to counteract that many were brought under a kind of monastic discipline.

Reforming Councils

The Second Lateran Council (1139), which took its name from the pope’s cathedral in Rome, affirmed the reform program, including the election of bishops by cathedral chapters, and the Third Lateran Council (1179) added prohibitions against holding a plurality of benefices and against laymen disposing of church property. The Second Council of Lyons (1274) decreed that bishops must be confirmed by the Holy See and that chapters were entitled to share in the governance of the diocese, which led to frequent disputes with bishops. Restrictions were placed on priests holding more than one benefice.

Monastic Exemptions

Because of the subservience of many bishops to lay control, the popes exempted many monasteries from episcopal authority, thereby making them centers of reform. But in some cases, lay patrons also had the power to appoint abbots, some of whom were not even monks and who merely collected the income of the abbey.

Clerical Vassals

As vassals within the feudal system, bishops and abbots made a ceremonial submission to their lords on the occasion of receiving their lands. But it was also customary for the lords to “invest” (clothe) the prelates with the staffs and rings that were the symbols of their episcopal office. Gregory VII sought to suppress both the ritual and the reality of submission that lay behind it.

Church and State

Having often liberated the popes from the Italians, the emperors themselves now became the principal threats to papal freedom, leading to three centuries of conflict over the proper understanding of the two swords. If popes could excommunicate kings, monarchs could recruit docile bishops to declare the reigning pope illegitimate, thereby allowing the ruler to proclaim an anti-pope in his place. There was no legal or moral justification for this, and from 1000 until almost 1400, no anti-pope ever enjoyed more than brief and local authority.

Emperor vs. Pope

Emperor Henry IV defied Pope Gregory VII, bolstered by the support of many of the German bishops, one of whom denigrated Gregory’s office by addressing him merely as “Brother Hildebrand”. But Henry did not have the support of many of his lay vassals. In 1076, Gregory excommunicated and deposed him, and, faced with rebellion, Henry was forced to seek out the Pope, who was on his way to Germany to ratify the deposition. Henry found him at Canossa in Italy, where for three days the emperor stood in the snow as a penitent begging for absolution, an incident that made “going to Canossa” a metaphor for a humiliating surrender. Gregory granted him absolution, and Henry, once shriven, hurried back to Germany to reassert his authority against the rebellious nobles who had elected a new emperor. A synod of imperial bishops declared Gregory deposed and allowed Henry to name an anti-pope, and Gregory died in exile from Rome, no longer supported even by many of his own cardinals.

Henry also kept Pope Bl. Urban II (1088-1099) out of the papal city for several years, and the emperor died unreconciled to the Church, in the midst of a rebellion by his son Henry V (1106-1125), who then drove Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) from Rome. Paschal first gave in to the emperor but then repented, and eventually Henry surrendered the right to invest bishops with their episcopal insignia. Papal-imperial tensions continued for a long time. In 1159, for example, Frederick Barbarossa set up an anti-pope and twice drove Pope Alexander III from Rome, although the emperor finally submitted.

The Power of the Keys

Conflicts were sometimes merely over immediate territorial or financial advantages, although popes and princes always invoked high moral and religious principles to justify their actions, and such principles were indeed at stake. Pope Gregory VII claimed sole authority to summon councils, appoint bishops, canonize saints, and depose emperors, the last not by temporal authority but by the spiritual authority that required the pope to make ultimate judgments concerning right and wrong—the “power of the keys”, the authority to bind and loose that Jesus gave to the Church. (Gregory also claimed that popes became saints solely by virtue of their offices, a claim that later popes did not repeat.)

Excommunication

The pope had little actual temporal power, but excommunication, with the presumption (but not the certainty) of damnation, was taken very seriously. Interdict (“to pronounce among”) was a prohibition on the administration of the sacraments in an entire territory, thereby placing additional pressure on a recalcitrant ruler. But these sanctions were ineffective unless a ruler’s vassals seized on them as justification for asserting their independence. Even then, the leverage of the pope could be diminished by temporal rulers shrewdly taking advantage of his priestly duty. As a priest, Gregory could not refuse the emperor when he arrived at Canossa as a penitent, even though absolution deprived Henry’s vassals of their grounds for rebellion and restored Henry to a position from which he could again threaten the papacy.

The Precariousness of Reform

The fight against lay investiture had limited results: it was officially forbidden but survived in some places. Monarchs and nobles continued to be involved in church affairs, especially in nominating bishops and collecting the revenues of vacant dioceses, a practice that motivated them to leave dioceses vacant as long as possible.

Although successful in its major goals, the Gregorian Reform by no means put an end to all problems, and the investiture issue was also by no means confined to the Empire. Pope Innocent II (1130-1143) had to struggle against an anti-pope who had Norman support and at one point was taken prisoner until he acknowledged Norman rule in southern Italy. King Philip I of France (1060-1108) was excommunicated three times during his long reign. In England, William the Conqueror supported reform, but his son, William II Rufus (1087-1100), whom the monastic chroniclers considered an enemy of the Church, exiled the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm (d. 1109), for opposing investiture, although Rufus’ brother Henry I (1100-1135) later submitted.

Ireland

Ireland, which had been the spiritual leader of the Church in the Dark Ages, was by now remote and isolated, wracked by continuous wars among territorial princes, each of whom was called a king. Two bishops—St. Malachy (d. 1148) and St. Laurence O’Toole (d. 1180)—tried with limited success to bring the island under the Gregorian reform. Momentously in terms of the history of the next nine centuries, the English Pope Hadrian IV (1154-1159), partly to implement reform, gave Ireland as a fief to Henry II of England (1154-1189), and a Norman aristocracy established itself there.

England

The most dramatic of the Church-state conflicts—even more than Canossa—occurred under King Henry II of England (1154-1189), who in consolidating his power forbade what he considered the improper use of excommunication, the consecration of bishops before they had rendered feudal homage to their lords, appeals from the royal courts to the papal court, and the ordination of serfs to the priesthood without their lords’ permission. He especially rejected the Church’s demand that those who had been ordained (including those in minor orders) be subject only to church courts when accused of a crime, a demand based partly on the principle that no one in England was exempt from royal authority and partly on the pragmatic consideration that the church courts could not inflict the death penalty. (Fugitives from the secular law could also take sanctuary in a church for a month.)

Becket

St. Thomas Becket (d. 1170) had been Henry’s friend and advisor, but after becoming archbishop of Canterbury, he showed himself a champion of the rights of the Church. The conflict between them was prolonged and complex, with Becket twice going into exile, until Henry reportedly muttered, “Will no one rid me of this low-born priest?” Taking this as a command, four of Henry’s knights traveled from Normandy to Canterbury and hacked Becket to death as he sought sanctuary in his cathedral. The incident aroused horror all over Europe, forcing Henry as a penitent to walk barefoot to the slain archbishop’s tomb, there to be ritually scourged, and to concede some of the disputed issues to the papacy. The actual murderers also repented and went on to the Crusades (see Chapter Seven below, pp. 200-204), and Becket’s tomb became the most important pilgrimage place in England (the destination of the characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales).

An International Order

The conflict between Becket and Henry II was over two ultimately irreconcilable dimensions of Christendom: the temporal power charged with the administration of justice in a particular kingdom and the spiritual power that defined a universal concept of justice. Were the clergy the subjects of their kings or the citizens of an international order?

Canon Law

An independent and dynamic Church possessed a complex machinery of government. Justinian’s Code had become the basis of the law codes of most kingdoms, and in the mid-twelfth century the monk-lawyer Gratian of Bologna (d. ca. 1150) used Justinian to systematize the Church’s canon law. As the church courts developed, they came to have jurisdiction not only over obvious spiritual issues—heresy, blasphemy, sorcery, simony—but also over marriage, wills, and usury, thereby inevitably becoming points of contention with kings.

So sophisticated was canon law that legal processes were often interminably complex and difficult, dragging on for years and comprehensible only to trained lawyers. John of Salisbury, one of the leading bishops and scholars of the age and a man who actually witnessed Becket’s martyrdom, had severe misgivings about the cold rigor of law and urged greater dependence on the spirit of the Gospel. The papal courts at Rome also received a continuous stream of appeals from local ecclesiastical courts, and the papacy built up a sophisticated bureaucracy that served as a model for secular rulers, including a network of papal legates to the various princely courts and a financial system able to collect taxes from all over Europe.

The Papal States

Besides theoretical issues of authority, there was continuous conflict between popes and emperors over the control of Italy, as the emperors claimed their traditional sovereignty there and the popes struggled to maintain the security of their own domain. Italian politics was for centuries divided into two rival groups that existed in almost every state—the Guelfs (probably named for a German princely house), who looked to the papacy for leadership, and the Ghibellines (probably named for an imperial castle), who were loyal to the emperor.

Innocent III

Popes often successfully intervened in international conflicts. Papal authority reached its zenith with Innocent III (1198-1216), the most powerful of all the popes, who combined the roles of spiritual and temporal ruler. Kingship was a divine office, and Innocent conceived it his duty to ensure that kings acted accordingly, whereas no earthly authority could check the actions of the pope. Innocent first secured his rule over Rome itself and subsequently intervened in numerous conflicts: determining who was the rightful emperor, bringing the several Spanish kingdoms together in the war against the Muslims, and intervening in disputes between France and England and in internal disputes in both kingdoms.

Magna Carta

Innocent excommunicated King John of England (1199-1216), partly because the king refused to accept the papal nominee, Stephen Langton (d. 1228), as archbishop of Canterbury. The English nobles, led by Langton, were then able to extort the Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) of liberties from John, although, as Henry IV had done, the king hastily submitted to the Pope, even making himself a papal vassal, thereby causing Innocent to question the legitimacy of Magna Carta.

Frederick II

Emperor Frederick II (1215-1250) was the son of Henry VI, and after his father’s death became Innocent’s ward. After he came of age, Frederick invaded Germany, defeated a rival claimant, and was proclaimed emperor, so that the subsequent history of the Empire was one of almost continuous civil war, in which the leading bishops were deeply involved. Frederick was called the “marvel of the world”, both because of his aggressive pursuit of his goals and because he seemed to live outside the mainstream of Christian culture. He vigorously persecuted heresy, but he was also rumored to have murdered three wives, and he outraged people by using Muslim soldiers in his Italian wars.

Frederick constituted a serious threat to papal independence because of his designs on Sicily, and he was excommunicated several times, both for failing to go on a crusade as he promised and for his territorial designs. The conclave that began in 1241 lasted a year and a half, during which the Roman civic authorities pressured, and even physically abused, the cardinals to force an election.

Innocent IV (1243-1254) was finally chosen and, after having been driven from Rome by Frederick’s armies, summoned a council to judge the emperor. Frederick, however, captured a hundred bishops on their way to the meeting and held them prisoner. Innocent then fled to Lyons in France and transferred the council there, and this First Council of Lyons declared the emperor deposed, announced a crusade against him, and placed Germany under interdict. This was the first time a “crusade” was proclaimed against a Christian monarch. Frederick died unabsolved.

Louis IX

If Frederick II epitomized the popes’ view of a bad ruler, St. Louis IX of France (1226-1270) embodied the Christian ideal. His mother, Blanche of Castile (d. 1252) ruled for him until he came of age and impressed on him the obligations of piety, going so far as to admonish him to regard the sins of his people as reflections on himself. Louis attended Mass daily, prayed with almost mystical intensity, affiliated himself with the Franciscans, supported the rights of the Church, and personally fed the poor from his table. He espoused a concept of justice based on divine law, discouraged trial by battle, made himself available to hear appeals from his subjects, and set up a system for the manumission (“sending from the hand”) of serfs. He went on a crusade, was captured and ransomed, brought back relics from the Holy Land that he enshrined in the exquisite Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and died in North Africa while on another crusade.

Papal Politics

Pope Urban IV (1261-1264) supported the claims of Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou (d. 1285), to Sicily, thereby beginning a tangled conflict that would continue into the next century. Charles pressured the cardinals into electing the Frenchman Martin IV (1281-1285), and Martin blindly supported Charles’ ambitions, including his claim to the Byzantine Empire, based on the Crusade of 1204 (see Chapter Seven below, p. 203). When Charles was driven out of Sicily in a rebellion in 1282, Martin excommunicated and deposed King Peter III of Aragon (1276-1285), who had accepted the Sicilians’ invitation to become their ruler.

The Transformation of Society

Chivalry

The Church attempted to transform the feudal knight, the descendant of the barbarian warrior, into the Christian knight through the ideal of chivalry (from the French word for “horse”), which was a fusion of Christianity with the barbarian traditions. The knight was urged to dedicate his prowess to the protection of the weak and the defense of the faith, with his initiation into knighthood preceded by an all-night vigil before the altar and the blessing of his weapons and armor.

The chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) glorified war in a good cause—legends of King Arthur, Charlemagne (the Song of Roland), and the Crusades. Some of these tales were amalgamated with the even more legendary search for the lost Holy Grail used by Jesus at the Last Supper, something that only a blameless knight could recover.

Restraints on Bloodshed

The Church sought to curtail feudal violence through the Peace of God, which forbade attacks on women, clergy, and other noncombatants, and the Truce of God, which allowed warfare only Monday through Wednesday of each week and forbade it completely during holy seasons and on an increasing number of holy days. The Peace of God and Truce of God, along with the new military religious orders and the Crusades, sought to redirect warlike impulses.

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made absolute the prohibition on clergy shedding blood. It forbade them to practice surgery and to participate in the traditional barbarian judicial process called the “ordeal”, in which an accused person was “tried” either by being made to handle a hot iron or by being thrown into a pond. (If the hand failed to show burns, or the person failed to sink, this unnatural occurrence was taken as a supernatural sign of guilt.) Disputes between nobles were often settled through trial by battle, in which the antagonists fought one-on-one (the duel, meaning “two”). The outcome of the duel was believed to demonstrate which side had divine favor. The abolition of the ordeal, which left trial by jury as the principal judicial process, was a sign of the developing respect for reason in the West. The growing reliance upon rational proof culminated in philosophy and theology, although it grew alongside a great deal of credulity, even among the learned.

Communes

The commune movement often brought the citizens of towns into conflict with the bishops, who traditionally exercised governance of those towns. The most extreme case was at Rome itself, where a deposed abbot named Arnold of Brescia (d. 1155), an austere man who was nonetheless a revolutionary, accused Pope Hadrian IV of corruption, led a revolt that drove Hadrian out of Rome, seized church property, and proclaimed a commune that was meant to restore the ancient Roman Republic. The Pope returned, with Barbarossa’s help, and Arnold was burned as a heretic.

Guilds

The guilds, which usually controlled the town governments, were organizations of merchants and craftsmen. Although made up of commoners, they embodied the notion of social hierarchy in their division into masters, journeymen, and apprentices. In principle, guilds were at least as much religious and social as economic. They provided for the burial of dead members and aid to their survivors (a kind of insurance program), and each guild had its patron saint, patronal church, and patronal feast. There were also various kinds of confraternities (“brotherhoods”) established for charitable purposes.

Religious Life

Reform

The history of the Church in the Middle Ages is to a great extent the history of both new and reformed religious communities. Monasticism’s success was in a sense also its failure, in that houses with reputations for austerity and holiness attracted generous donations that threatened to undermine those same virtues. Wealth was universally recognized as corruptive of monastic life, but there was no obvious solution. Monasticism was sometimes reformed by patrons or abbots who simply expelled lax monks and replaced them with more dedicated men. An early twelfth-century experiment placed temporal power in the hands of lay brothers, thereby allowing the clerics to devote themselves entirely to spiritual exercises, but the system proved to be merely a corrupting temptation to the brothers.

Cluny

Cluny established a monastic system somewhat like feudalism—a pyramid with itself at the top, presiding over numerous dependent monasteries. By 1100, it had 1,450 daughter houses, some of which it had established, some of which had voluntarily placed themselves under its authority. Cluny was guided by a series of abbots who were elected when young and proved to be extraordinarily long-lived—only three between 954 and 1109. In order to ensure strict adherence to the Benedictine Rule, most of Cluny’s dependent houses did not have elected abbots but were governed by priors (“firsts”) appointed from Cluny, while the novices from all the monasteries received their formation at the motherhouse.

While Cluny never became corrupt in a gross sense, and even gave the Church two reform popes—Urban II and Paschal II—its enormous wealth and the sheer size and complexity of its activities weakened the monastic spirit to some extent. The abbot resided in his own house, and much time was taken up with administration and with elaborate celebrations of the liturgy in a lavish church with rich mosaic floors, huge wall hangings, and accouterments such as eighteen-foot candlesticks. At the abbey of St. Denis near Paris, the altar cross was twenty-four feet high, and the church was hung with rich tapestries and gloried in its gold and jeweled sacred vessels.

Camaldolese

Perhaps partly because of dissatisfaction with the high degree of organization among the Benedictines, beginning in the late ninth century, there was a revival of the hermetical life, this time with formal structures based on the Benedictine Rule. St. Romuald (d. 1027) was an Italian abbot who was forced out of his monastery because of his severity and then formed a group of hermits into a new order called the Camaldolese, from their location, a group that practiced severe penances.

Carthusians

St. Bruno (d. 1101), a German, founded a new order of monks called the Carthusians, from the location of their first monastery near Chartreuse in the French Alps. They lived primarily as hermits and came together only for the liturgy and for occasional common activities.

Cistercians

In 1098, three Benedictines—St. Alberic (d. 1109), St. Robert (d. 1110), and St. Stephen Harding (d. 1134)—founded a new community dedicated to the strict observance of the Benedictine Rule. They were called Cistercians from the site of their monastery at Citeaux, also in France. The Cistercians embraced a life of meticulous celebration of the Divine Office, rigorous fasting, perpetual silence, and manual labor. They did not emphasize learning, as Cluny did. Perhaps precisely because of this severity, Citeaux gave birth to almost seventy daughter houses.

Avoiding all hint of luxury, Cistercians could not accept gifts or collect the tithes due to parishes under their patronage, and each monastery could possess only enough land to support itself. Through hard work and austerity, Cistercian monasteries gained a reputation for economic efficiency, both in agriculture and the production of wool for the market, and to achieve their desired solitude, they often pioneered the opening of new lands.

Contemplation

The new monasticism required discipline not only as penance for sin but as a means to undistracted contemplation, enabling the monk to know God in deeper ways, to move beyond limited human concepts to a mystical knowledge of the divine. The writings of the monastic theologians gave the Church a new spirit of interiority.

Bernard of Claivaux

St. Bernard, who entered Citeaux with thirty of his relatives and companions and was soon made prior of its daughter house of Clairvaux, was in some ways the most important religious leader of the Middle Ages, not only as a reformer of monastic life but as a theologian and preacher, even as an advisor to princes. One of his monks became pope as Bl. Eugene III (1145-1153).

Suger

Only somewhat less important than Bernard as a religious leader was Suger (d. 1151), a man of low birth who became abbot of St. Denis. Primarily because of the elaborateness of the Benedictine liturgy, Suger and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny (d. 1156), sometimes found themselves at cross purposes with Bernard, who once rebuked Suger for St. Denis’ relative laxness. Suger took the rebuke to heart, but he remained a man of affairs in ways rather different from that of the austere Bernard but equally representative of the spirit of the times.

Abbey of Bec

The Norman Benedictine abbey of Bec, founded in 1039, was not affiliated with Cluny and emphasized study over elaborate liturgies. It became a center of intellectual life, with Bl. Lanfranc (d. 1089) and St. Anselm, two successive archbishops of Canterbury, among its abbots.

Abbesses

Except for an occasional queen, abbesses were the most important women in the Middle Ages, far more powerful than most women before World War II could hope to be. They had a great deal of spiritual authority and presided over large, complex, and wealthy institutions, although, unlike abbots, they seldom became involved in secular politics. St. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) was an educated German abbess who had mystical visions and wrote complex musical compositions to express them. With the approval of Bernard and Pope Eugene III, she advised bishops and sometimes spoke in public on pressing issues.

Canons

Canons were groups of clergy living in communities, as in cathedral chapters, and “canons regular” were secular clergy devoted to parish work or to education but living under a quasi-monastic rule. To bring the benefits of monasticism to parish life, St. Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134) founded the Premonstratensians, so called from the location of their monastery near the French town of Prémontré. Norbert, who was himself German, became the reforming archbishop of Magdeburg in Germany, from which he sent Premonstratensians as missionaries to central and eastern Europe.

Double Monasteries

Norbert of Xanten and the Englishman St. Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189) both founded double monasteries in which separate communities of men and women, under a common rule, shared the same church and participated in the same liturgies, in some cases with both under the authority of an abbess. But after a time the arrangement was forbidden.

“The Frenchman”

St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) was perhaps the greatest figure of medieval Christianity and, after Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the most admired Christian in all of history. He was born Giovanni Bernadone in the commercial northern Italian city with which he is identified. His father was a wealthy cloth merchant, and the son made regular business trips across the Alps into southern France, where he picked up the fashionable French ways that earned him the nickname Francis (“the Frenchman”).

“Il Poverello”

Unpredictably, Francis underwent a sudden conversion in which he repudiated his worldly ways, gave away all his possessions, and ritually stripped himself naked in front of the bishop, after this father disowned him, to symbolize his renunciation of all worldly goods and to show his dependence on the bishop, becoming known as il poverello (“the little poor man”). Like other medieval saints, he made a special point of ministering to lepers, precisely because they were social outcasts and their sores repelled him.

Like many converts of earlier centuries, he lived for a time as a hermit, until he felt called upon to return to society to preach a radically simple message, urging people to give up everything and to live with complete faith in God’s benevolent providence. Adapting the courtly love poetry popular in southern France, he proclaimed his devotion to “Lady Poverty”.

The Lesser Brothers

At first, Francis understood a divine message, “Build up My Church”, to refer to ruined buildings, but in time he came to understand that his mission was to bring about a spiritual renewal. He did not intend to found a new religious order and at first merely attracted followers who wanted to live as he did. But eventually he consented to subject his group to a rule, in order to remain fully in communion with the Church, naming his new community the Order of Friars Minor (Ordo Fratrum Minorum—“Lesser Brothers”). But unlike most monastic pioneers, Francis had little regard for organization.

Holy Joy

He was not a social reformer, in that, far from wanting to eliminate poverty, he tried to persuade everyone to embrace it. Himself the product of an increasingly luxurious and acquisitive commercial society, he identified love of wealth as the principal root of sin. But despite his rigor, Francis manifested a kind of playful joy. In response to the recurrent heretical dualism that opposed spirit to matter, he had a sense of empathy with nature rare for his time, inspiring him to speak of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” and even to preach sermons to animals.³ Francis, who accompanied one of the Crusades, made the conversion of the Muslims the highest mission of his order, but for the most part that turned out to be an unrealistic goal.

Mendicants

Traditionally, monks could own nothing, but monasteries might be rich. Francis decreed that even the monasteries of his order should own nothing and that his followers should live as beggars (“mendicants”), but he reluctantly accepted an arrangement whereby they possessed their convents in fact but legally the buildings were held by “protectors” or “guardians”. Eventually, Francis resigned as general of the order he founded, and after his death his followers erected a magnificent church at Assisi, something of which he probably would not have approved.

Dominic

St. Dominic Guzman (d. 1221) was a Castilian priest who traveled to southern France around 1200 both to preach against heresy and to combat it through the example of a life of poverty. (Dominican mendicancy was intended to demonstrate that the orthodox too could be ascetic.) Like Francis, he quickly attracted followers. The Order of Preachers (Ordo Predicatorum), as Dominic called his community, followed the rule of the Augustinian canons. Their dedication to combating heresy drew them to the intellectual life, and their zeal, symbolized in the stark contrast of their black and white habits, inspired a pun on their name—“Domini canes” (“dogs of the Lord”).

Action and Contemplation

Both new communities were called friars rather than monks because, although living in monasteries under monastic discipline, they devoted themselves primarily to pastoral work instead of ascetic and liturgical practices, combining the active and contemplative ways of life and bringing the fruits of monastic piety to the laity, especially in the growing towns and cities. The worldliness of many of the hierarchy was recognized as one of the chief evils in the Church, and for that reason both Francis and Dominic decreed that their friars should not become bishops. In time, however, both were forced to accede to the demands of popes to provide the Church with good prelates.

Pope Innocent III was briefly repelled by Francis’ slovenliness but soon changed his mind. Although preoccupied with international politics, Innocent recognized the authenticity of the new groups and, despite a ruling by the Fourth Lateran Council that there should be no new religious orders, quickly gave them papal approval. Francis and Dominic were both revered as saints even in their own lifetimes and were formally canonized only a few years after their deaths.

Carmelites

The Carmelites, the third of the mendicant orders, were founded in the Holy Land in 1209 by the Englishman St. Simon Stock (d. 1265). It was first made up of hermits living on Mount Carmel and came to Europe a generation later.

Servites

The Order of the Servants of Mary was founded around 1300 in the highly prosperous city of Florence, by a small group of noblemen who were dissatisfied with their city’s worldliness.

Nuns and Tertiaries

Both the older and newer religious orders had female branches. A disciple of Francis named Clare (d. 1253) founded a community of “Poor Ladies”, who at first did charitable work in the world. But shortly thereafter, all officially recognized communities of women were required to be cloistered, a rule the “Poor Clares” were obliged to follow.

Both Franciscans and Dominicans established “third orders” (“tertiaries”) for lay people who lived in the world but to some extent shared in the life of vowed religious.

The Age of the Friars

In some ways, the High Middle Ages were the age of the friars in the same way that earlier centuries had been the age of the monks. The Franciscans’ unique combination of austerity and joy made them the most popular of religious communities, attracting thirty thousand members in their first century.

The Intellectual Life

Francis intended for his friars to preach a simple, heartfelt message and to eschew the intellectual life. But the prestige and importance of the universities was such that, almost immediately, both Franciscans and Dominicans began pursuing advanced studies. A University of Paris professor, William of St. Amour, spoke for many secular clergy in waging a fierce rhetorical war against the friars, even denying the importance of poverty, until he was himself ousted from the university at the behest of Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241). However, anti-mendicant hostility was so strong that a few years later the Dominican Aquinas had to be protected by royal archers as he lectured.

Fraticelli

The Franciscan movement also became the focus of prolonged and often bitter controversy, resented by many of the secular clergy as intruders into pastoral life but consistently supported by the papacy. A faction of friars called the Fraticelli (“Little Brothers”), or Spirituals, demanded that poverty be practiced very rigorously and were severe critics of clergy who did not do so. In retaliation, some secular clergy denied that Jesus had practiced absolute poverty or required it of His disciples. Some of the Spirituals adopted the Joachite prophecy concerning the third age of the Church and claimed that they would be the means of bringing it into being (see Chapter Eight below, pp. 158-59). Their leader, Peter John Olivi (d. 1298), appeared to teach that the papacy itself was the Antichrist. As general of the Franciscans and a cardinal, St. Bonaventure (d. 1274) opposed the Fraticelli, who were condemned but continued to be a vital movement.

Wealth and Poverty

The Snare of Wealth

Medieval people were repeatedly warned against the corrupting effects of riches, and complete renunciation of worldly goods was highly praised. But this presented a dilemma, because those who held high social positions, including the clergy, were expected to live in a style commensurate with their rank, so that those who did renounce their wealth virtually had to become monks. Privileged people were therefore supposed to practice inner detachment, and after death some bishops were discovered to have been wearing hair shirts beneath their splendid robes. Innocent III, the medieval pope most involved in worldly matters, wrote a standard treatise on the familiar theme of “contempt for the world” and recognized the importance of poverty.

Charity

Above all, the rich were expected to be generous in their charities, which was the reason God had given them wealth. There were few charities organized by the government as such, so that the needy depended on monasteries and on lay and clerical lords who distributed alms and endowed schools, hospitals, orphanages, leprosaria, and other institutions.

Usury

Somewhat unfairly, greed or avarice—one of the seven deadly sins—was often represented by a pinch-faced merchant or banker hoarding his money, much less often by a feudal lord whose wealth was in his land. Usury—the lending of money at interest for its “use”—was forbidden to Christians, thereby making money-lending the exclusive province of Jews. But despite the prohibition, the northern Italian cities gradually took over more and more of the trade, as the papacy itself began to work closely with the Italian banking houses. The prohibition on usury was based on the assumption that money is sterile and cannot reproduce itself and on the belief that it is wrong to profit from the misfortunes of those in need. But in the thirteenth century, canonists began to devise ways by which interest could be collected on loans made not because of need but for purposes of investment.

The Ideal of Justice

For the sake of the common good, the Church attempted to balance the interests of producers and consumers by condemning the vice of greed and encouraging “just wages” and “just prices”, which, along with the regulation of the quality of goods, was undertaken by guilds and town governments. Especially in the financial and industrial cities of northern Italy, rising prosperity, with which the Christian conscience was not wholly at ease, was often seen as both the cause and the result of greed and as something that distracted people from their heavenly goal.

Heterodox Reform

“Reform” has been a constant theme in the history of the Church, meaning primarily a return to the “apostolic life” of simplicity and poverty. The program of reform led to demands for a “pure” Christianity that had allegedly been subverted over time. Such movements became heretical when they went beyond the condemnation of clerical abuses and denied the authority of the clerical office itself and of the sacramental system. Many adherents of dissident sects pursued a life of perfection on the margins of society, rejecting the idea of Christendom as a compromise of the Gospel and regarding the true Church as a small elite. Charismatic leaders—sometimes hermits—arose periodically. Bernard noted that their followers always included women and scoffed that sexual license was at the root of the phenomenon.

Tanchelm

In the Low Countries around 1100, a layman named Tanchelm (d. 1157) first put on monk’s robes and preached in the fields, calling the Church a brothel and the sacraments a pollution, then put on regal garments and declared himself betrothed to the Virgin Mary. He was killed in an armed skirmish. Tanchelm’s movement may have given rise to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a loosely organized network of people who repudiated the Church and exalted semi-ecstatic mystical experiences, a movement that survived for several centuries.

Waldo

Peter Waldo was a merchant who—unheard of for a layman—translated the Bible into French and on that basis concluded that the Church was corrupt. He sold all his goods, abandoned his wife, and began preaching, attracting followers who were called the Poor Men of Lyons, the city where Waldo resided. He was expelled from Lyons in 1185, and his fate is unknown, although his movement, while never large, spread fairly widely.⁴ After Waldo’s death the Poor Men constituted a direct attack on the “institutional” character of the Church—hierarchy, priesthood, the sacraments, Purgatory. Each believer was thought to be inspired directly by the Holy Spirit, and the renunciation of property was the principal sign of authentic faith.

Humiliati

The Humiliati (“humble”) were a lay group founded in Italy in the late twelfth century and composed of both men and women, single and married, who tried to live the simple life. They did not attack the Church and were approved by Innocent III, who allowed them to preach about morality but not about doctrine, based on the pope’s judgment that they led good Christian lives but were not learned in theology.

Joachim of Flora

Millenarianism was often a feature of sectarian beliefs. Joachim of Flora (d. 1202) was a worldly Italian nobleman who underwent a conversion of heart while on the Crusades. He became a Cistercian and was elected abbot but abandoned that office to devote himself to expounding what he claimed were the hidden meanings of Scripture. History, he taught, was divided into three ages, each guided by one of the Persons of the Trinity. The age of the Father was before the coming of Christ. The age of the Son—the age of the Incarnation, hence of the visible Church—was coming to an end, and the age of the Holy Spirit, beginning about 1260, would be characterized by a wholly spiritual faith based on divine inspiration and the achievement of human perfection. Joachitism stayed alive for centuries, often anticipating the imminent end of the world and opposing most institutional forms of religion.

Beguines and Beghards

The reform movement deeply influenced lay piety. Beguines and Beghards (the origin of whose names is uncertain) were respectively female and male groups that began in the Low Countries in the twelfth century. These groups were made up of lay people who were self-supporting and engaged in works of charity but who also took vows of chastity and lived in communities, which they were free to leave. (See Chapter Eight, p. 221 regarding the orthodoxy of the Beguines and Beghards.)

Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade

The major deviant religious movement of the Middle Ages was led by the Cathars (“Pure”), who began in the Near East with a species of Gnosticism or Manichaeism, made their way westward through the Balkans, and found a home in southern France, where they came to be called Albigensians, from the town of Albi. They were organized as a church, with its own clergy and dioceses. Catharism was scarcely a Christian heresy at all but a rival religion based on an extreme dualism of matter and spirit, postulating a universe divided between two opposed deities, of whom the biblical God was the god of evil and the Church was the invention of Satan. The Cathars preached perfection for the few “Perfect” and antinomianism for the many “Believers” and condemned marriage because human sexuality is inherently evil and the procreation of children traps souls in bodies. The Perfect refrained from all sexual activity, while the Believers were allowed free sex but were not supposed to procreate.

By the late twelfth century, the movement had the support of some French nobles, especially Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (d. 1222), as well as a popular base. The southern French bishops were despised as worldly, and a series of preaching missions mostly failed. When a papal legate was murdered in 1208, Innocent III proclaimed a crusade that captured several Cathar strongholds, committing atrocities in the process. Notoriously, a papal legate at one siege was reported to have shouted, “Kill them all! God will know His own!”

Complex political intrigues followed, in which Raymond, who had ostensibly repented, regained his lands, then again began protecting the Cathars. A second crusade followed in 1226, mounted by Louis VIII (1223-1226) and Louis IX. Raymond submitted yet again, and about two hundred Cathars were burned as heretics. The movement gradually died out.

The Nature of Heresy

Heresy was considered a spiritual disease or infection that, if allowed to spread, would poison the entire community. Since God had revealed the truth to His Church, heretics were considered obstinately blind for having departed from that truth, motivated by pride and self-will rather than simple ignorance. (Some were admitted to be very ascetic, which was taken as further manifestation of their pride and as a snare to trap the simple.)

The Inquisition

The judicial processes later institutionalized in the Inquisition were first employed in 1022, when twelve canons of Orleans were burned at the stake, accused of denying the most fundamental doctrines of the faith, such as the creation of the world by God. The Inquisition, established in 1184, was directly under papal authority. Every diocese was ordered to have an office charged with ferreting out heresy, but in time the entire responsibility was given to the Franciscans and Dominicans.

Inquisition simply meant an inquiry that followed the procedures of Roman law, whereby an accusation in itself established some presumption of guilt. The accused, although not permitted to confront their accusers, could submit a list of their enemies, whose testimony was then inadmissible. The accused were allowed to answer the charges and were sometimes allowed to have counsel. Torture was permitted in order to obtain a confession, but it was used sparingly in heresy cases, since an individual who denied being a heretic was considered to have recanted. Defendants were often acquitted, convictions could be appealed to the pope and were sometimes overturned, and occasionally an overzealous inquisitor was removed and punished by the Holy See.

The chief purpose of the Inquisition was to persuade the accused heretic to recant, in which case he was made to do public penance. Inquisitors continued to look for signs of repentance and occasionally snatched a repentant heretic from the flames at the last moment. But since the time of the Donatists of North Africa, civil governments had sometimes put heretics to death, because heresy was regarded as destructive of the social order. The Justinian Code provided for the death penalty, although some churchmen, notably Bernard, protested the practice.

After the executions at Orleans, there were almost no executions for two centuries. Innocent III defined heresy as treason against God but did not authorize the death penalty, and the Fourth Lateran Council merely imposed banishment. But the Crusades—the war against the infidel overseas—seemed to dictate war also against domestic infidels. Condemned heretics were imprisoned, and, although the Inquisition was founded in part to keep the prosecution of heresy out of the hands of the state, recalcitrants were turned over to the civil government, which church officials now commanded to carry out the execution.

The Crusades in Europe

The material and spiritual recovery of the West was dramatically demonstrated when Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade (“war of the Cross”) in 1095, an action that served several purposes: retaking the Holy Land from the Muslims, making pilgrimages once again possible, demonstrating concretely the unity of Christendom, and providing the European nobility with a cause worthy of their warlike spirit. Crusaders were invested with a cloak bearing the sign of the cross, and their property was placed under the protection of the Church during their absence.

Indulgences

The Crusaders took pilgrims’ vows and received the indulgences traditionally attached to pilgrimages: grants by the Church that offered remission from the punishments deserved for one’s sins both in this life and in Purgatory, a remission that could be applied to the souls of the deceased as well. (Sometimes those who impulsively took the vow later asked to be dispensed and were allowed to redeem it by a monetary payment in support of the Crusade, a practice that elided into the “sale” of indulgences.)

The Warlike Spirit

The Crusaders’ cry was “God wills it”, and they exemplified both the highest and lowest aspects of medieval civilization. The Crusades could not have been mounted without an overriding religious passion that turned warlike impulses outward, and the original motives of those who volunteered were almost always pious, since the expense was huge and the chance of never returning was equally great. Inevitably, however, there were opportunities for gratuitous brutality and greed.

The Jews

The Crusades aroused popular millenarian beliefs that were never far beneath the surface, with the recapture of the Holy Land seen as the immediate preliminary for the Second Coming. Although local bishops made some effort to protect them, the Jews were sometimes robbed and massacred by crusading armies marching through Europe, apparently in the belief that the Jews were as great an obstacle to a Christian claim to the Holy Land, as were the Muslims. (Some crusade preachers openly advocated anti-Jewish violence, although Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, condemned it.)

Popular Enthusiasm

The Crusades awakened powerful and unpredictable emotions in people. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities opposed this hysteria but could not stem the emotions that made the Crusades into a genuinely popular movement. Many noncombatants accompanied the armies—clergy, including bishops, but also prostitutes.

During the First Crusade, a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit (d. 1115) attracted twenty thousand volunteers to Cologne, many of them peasants and other noncombatants who marched to the East in what was called the People’s Crusade. In 1212, the Children’s Crusade lured away thousands, not all of whom were children, many of whom never returned, and some of whom were sold into slavery in North Africa by unscrupulous sea captains. In 1251, hordes of poor people called pastoraux (“shepherds”) rampaged through France under the direction of a mysterious figure called the Master of Hungary, demanding the liberation of the Holy Places and assaulting and even killing clergy. The movement was put down by Louis IX.

Conversions in Europe

Further sign of the medieval revival was the conversion of the few remaining pagan areas of Europe. The Magyars of Hungary were converted in the early eleventh century through their king, St. Stephen I (1000-1038), who married the sister of the sainted Henry II of Germany.

The Poles conquered the Wends of northeastern Europe in 1121 and began to rechristianize them. Pope Eugene III authorized a crusade against the Wends by Emperor Conrad III (1138-1152), specifying that the war should be fought to completion, without truce or compromise, and Bernard justified a policy of forced conversions. Christianity was thus extended along the Baltic coast (modern Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), partly by force and partly by missionary effort.

But progress was precarious: as late as 1261 a Lithuanian king apostatized, destroyed his cathedral, and built a pagan temple in its place, although a royal marriage to a Polish princess in 1385 permanently restored Catholicism. The Church gained a foothold in Finland around 1200, but the Lapps of the far North remained pagan, the last European people to do so.

The Reconquista

The Muslims were forced back in Western Europe during the eleventh century, entirely expelled from Sicily by the Normans, and slowly pushed back by the Spanish. In 1035, Catholic Spain was divided into the kingdoms of Navarre, Castile, and Aragon, with Castile gradually assuming leadership in the age of the legendary hero El Cid (“The Lord”, d. 1099), and by 1100 Muslim Spain had been reduced to a collection of small principalities. The Reconquest led to the crusade ideal being applied to Europe as well as the Holy Land. When the Second Crusade was proclaimed in 1146, Pope Eugene III granted Crusader status to those fighting the Muslims in Spain, and volunteers came from all over.

However, a new Muslim invasion from Africa, as well as dissension among the Christians themselves, impeded the Reconquest that was the dominant reality of medieval Spain. In an extreme case, Alfonso VI of Castile (1065-1109) designated his son by his Muslim mistress to be his heir, provoking a rebellion by his legitimate sons in which the heir was killed. In 1212, an expedition of all the Spanish Catholic states inflicted a major defeat on the Muslims, and in 1239, the king of Castile, St. Ferdinand III (1217-1252), took Cordoba and forced the Muslims to reestablish their caliphate yet further south, at Granada, the last remaining Muslim state in the peninsula.

Devotional Life

Asceticism

Asceticism—disciplining oneself to submit to God’s will—was the dominant moral ideal of the Middle Ages, manifest most perfectly by monks and nuns but enjoined to one degree or another on everyone by fasting, the patient acceptance of suffering, lengthy devotions, self-imposed penances like scourging, and difficult and dangerous pilgrimages.

Prayer Books

Prayer books for the laity, enabling the literate minority to perform their private devotions during Mass and at other times, became common, and “books of hours” (the Divine Office) were especially treasured, many of them elaborately illustrated. The books were in Latin, since those who were literate could read that sacred language.

Preaching

Preaching was greatly valued, and priests deemed unqualified to compose their own sermons might read a homily from one of the Fathers of the Church. While homilies were expositions of the Scripture of the day’s Mass, sermons could be on a variety of subjects and were increasingly preached outside Mass. In large churches, they were no longer delivered from the sanctuary (“holy place”) but from pulpits (“platforms”) erected halfway along the nave, to enable everyone to hear.

Pilgrimages

Pilgrimages remained the highest aspiration of popular devotion. A few people were able to travel to the Holy Land (some never able to return), while in Europe itself the most revered destinations were Rome and the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

The Human Jesus

In terms of piety, the greatest achievement of the Middle Ages was devotion to the human Jesus, an intimacy begun by Bernard, in contrast to the earlier Western emphasis on Jesus as Judge of the living and the dead and the Byzantine sense of His remoteness.

Whereas in earlier centuries, the Passion of Christ was overshadowed by His Resurrection, devotion to His Passion, including intense personal sorrow, now became a hallmark of piety. Whereas in earlier centuries, the crucifix had been a grim reminder of the judgment awaiting all people, it now became an object of compassion, stirring the faithful to share in Christ’s sufferings, just as He shared theirs, an emotion Bernard urged believers to accept as wholly appropriate. Devout people often engaged in self-scourging as a way of both expiating their sins and sharing in the Passion.

Devotion to Jesus in His Sacred Heart grew, promoted especially by two nuns: the Fleming St. Lutgardis of Aywières (d. 1246) and the German St. Gertrude the Great (d. 1302), both of whom experienced mystical union with the heart of Christ.

Crèche and Stigmata

Francis of Assisi was the first person known to have manifested the stigmata (originally, a term for a brand put on slaves)—the wounds of Christ imprinted on his hands and feet, the ultimate sharing in the sufferings of Christ. But Francis brought devotion to the human Jesus to another kind of fruition by introducing the crèche, or Nativity scene, into popular devotion. Daringly, later medieval art sometimes even portrayed the Christ Child at play.

Novenas

Although the liturgy itself seldom addressed Christ directly, people were increasingly encouraged to pray to Him in their private devotions. Novenas, which had become very popular by the High Middle Ages, were a series of prayers or devotions spread out over nine days or nine weeks, possibly because of the nine days Jesus’ Apostles and disciples spent in the upper room after His Ascension.

Marian Piety

Marian piety also became intensely popular, offering the faithful a loving Mother who interceded for them with her Son, mitigating the demands of strict justice by mercy, another step in the process by which the harshness of the warrior culture was softened by other emotions. The principal Marian feasts were the Purification, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and her Nativity, and in time a special Office of the Blessed Virgin was introduced. The rule of Cluny required that every monastery have a “Lady chapel” and that it dedicate Saturday to Mary. The Marian shrine at Walsingham in England became one of the major pilgrimage places, and numerous churches and cathedrals were dedicated to Mary.

“Hail Mary”

The Annunciation—the moment when Mary was given her divine commission, her free acceptance of which became the model for all her Son’s disciples—was the most popular of Marian themes, depicted already in the Roman catacombs. By 1100, the recitation of the Ave Maria, based on the angel’s greeting, “Hail, full of grace”, had become popular, partly as a way of affirming the goodness of childbearing. The rosary, with its continued repetition of that prayer, was first promoted by the early Dominicans, although not invented by them, and the public recitation of the Angelus (“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary”)—punctuating the day at three equal intervals—was introduced in the fourteenth century.

Marian Titles

The Song of Songs, which had traditionally been understood as expressing the love of Christ for His Church or the relationship of Christ and the soul, was now increasingly understood as referring to Mary. From it, new Marian titles were taken, such as “Star of the Sea”, who guides voyagers across the treacherous waters of life.

Sorrowful Mother

As devotion to Christ’s Passion grew, so did devotion to the Sorrowful Mother, as in the hymn “Stabat Mater” (“At the cross her station keeping. . .”). The faithful were urged to experience Mary’s sorrows in their own lives, sorrows eventually identified as seven: the prophecy of Simeon (“a sword shall pierce your soul”), the flight into Egypt, the temporary loss of the boy Jesus in the Temple, His carrying His Cross, His Crucifixion, taking down His body from the Cross, and His burial.

Assumption

Devotion to the Sorrowful Mother grew alongside devotion to the triumphant Mary, Queen of Heaven, who was portrayed as seated on a throne alongside her Son. Her Assumption into Heaven, which was almost universally believed in the East, was also widely accepted in the West, although it was not an official dogma until 1950. Although the Scriptures are silent about Mary’s death, most theologians thought it inappropriate that the body that had given flesh to Christ should have been allowed to decay in the grave.

Immaculate Conception

Anselm, the greatest theologian of the eleventh century, taught the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Bernard had a particularly strong devotion to Mary and taught that, as the Mother of Jesus, her face was the most like His and was therefore a foretaste of the Beatific Vision. But neither Bernard nor Aquinas accepted the Immaculate Conception. (Bernard said he would defer to the judgment of the Holy See on the question, but no formal proclamation was forthcoming until 1854.)

Loreto

Perhaps the most startling belief about Mary, which was shared by many of the learned, was that the house where Jesus grew up in Nazareth had been miraculously transported to Loreto in Italy, where it became a major pilgrimage place.

Prayers for the Dead

There was a widely held belief that only a saintly minority would be saved and that most people were damned, which gave the practice of praying for the dead a special urgency. The Italian Dominican archbishop Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) compiled theGolden Legend, the greatest collection of saints’ lives up to that time and the source of many later stories. (The word legend in the Middle Ages did not imply untruth but meant literally “something to be read”.)

Saintly Royalty

Most canonized saints were clergy and religious, and the most conspicuous class of lay saints were royalty, who were honored less for their political achievements than for their piety and devotion to the Church. These included Henry II of Germany (1002-1024), Olaf II of Norway (1015-1030), Alfred (871-899) and Edward the Confessor (1042-1066) of England, Stephen I (1000-1038) and Ladislas I of Hungary (1077-1095), Canute IV of Denmark (1080-1086), Louis IX of France (1226-1270), Margaret of Scotland (1046-1093), Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231), and Elizabeth of Portugal (1271-1336). Piety did not always fit closely with politics. Henry II of Germany at one point allied himself with pagan tribes against the Catholic king of Poland, but on the other hand, one of his successors, Henry III, proclaimed a Day of Indulgence on which he solemnly forgave his enemies and asked that they forgive his transgressions.

Relics

There was a great deal of credulity about relics, and churches that claimed notable collections became pilgrimage places that were also sources of considerable revenue to the local community. Relics were solemnly enthroned, kept in rich and elaborate containers, carried in processions through the street, sometimes stolen, and avidly bought and sold, even though such commerce constituted simony. When Louis IX died in North Africa, there was competition between his son and his brother for possession of his body, which was divided between them, and when Aquinas died at a Cistercian monastery, the monks retained certain parts of his body before sending the remains to his Dominican confreres.

Marriage

Validity

The Church took increasing responsibility for matrimony, defining the degrees of blood relationship within which a valid marriage could occur, requiring the free consent of the spouses, allowing an unconsummated marriage to be annulled (“made nothing”), and requiring a liturgical ceremony, although a marriage was considered valid so long as it could be shown that the couple had made a verbal commitment to each other. Divorce (literally, a “split” or “cutting”) did not exist in the sense of the dissolution of a valid marriage, but church courts decided numerous appeals for separation, based on the serious misconduct of one of the spouses, and even more cases claiming the invalidity of the marriage, mainly because of lack of consent.

Besides the church ceremony, the marriage bed was also solemnly blessed before being occupied, and after childbirth, the new mother underwent the ceremony of “churching”, the significance of which seems to have been understood in various ways—in some cases, as a kind of ritual purification, in others as a kind of ritual honor to motherhood.

Theologians took an increasingly positive view of marriage, as not merely a remedy for concupiscence, as Paul implied in one place, but as a divinely ordained sacrament, modeled on the relationship between Christ and His Church, as Paul said in another.

Procreation

The culture of courtly love (see below) required the avoidance of pregnancy, which caused the Church to reiterate strongly that the purpose of marriage is procreation. Some theologians also justified marital sex on the Pauline grounds that it forestalled adultery, therefore the desire for children did not have to be a conscious motive. Aquinas considered sexual pleasure to be an inducement to the act of procreation and not necessarily sinful. To refuse to pay the “marital debt”—intercourse with one’s spouse—was sinful, in that it might tempt the spouse to adultery, and moralists hesitated over approving the long absence from home of men who went on Crusades.

The Lay Vocation

Monastic life in itself was considered superior to life in the world, to the point where married couples were allowed to separate in order to enter religious life. But monastic life had its own temptations, so that a good layman might have a higher place in Heaven than an indifferent monk. Pope Alexander III stated that virginity was not necessary for a life of perfection and, paradoxically, certain monastic writers especially extolled the love between husband and wife.

Divorce

However, monarchs in particular, for pragmatic reasons, were often at odds with the Christian ideal of marriage, because they married and divorced in order to cement diplomatic alliances or promote their dynasties. Philip I of France was excommunicated for divorcing his wife and marrying his cousin, thereby committing a double sin. Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), the most celebrated woman of the twelfth century, was divorced by Philip’s grandson, Louis VII (1137-1180), after allegedly carrying on an adulterous affair while on crusade with her husband. Pope Eugene III allowed the split because Louis and Eleanor were related by blood, and she then married Henry II of England, with whom she had an equally stormy relationship.⁵

Arranged Marriages

Almost all aristocratic marriages were arranged for dynastic or economic purposes; and, while prevailing customs did not make love a prerequisite for marriage, it was hoped that love would grow throughout the life of the married couple. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, alongside the Christian ideal of marriage there thus developed the culture of “courtly love”, so-called because it was popular at the courts of the nobility.

The medieval “romances” (so-called because, as vernacular French, they were derived from the language of Rome) revived the sense of love as a sexual passion deeply rooted in the soul, something celebrated among the ancients but largely ignored in early Christianity. Courtly love usually celebrated an attraction between a man and a woman who were not married to each other, an attraction that sometimes culminated in adultery, as in the story of the legendary King Arthur of Britain, whose queen, Guinevere, and his best knight, Lancelot, had an affair that destroyed the mythical kingdom of Camelot.

Troubadors

The courtly-love movement originated in southern France and probably owed much to Arabic sources, as well as to the Cathars. It was spread by traveling singers called troubadours—both male and female—the origin of whose name is uncertain. Courtly love celebrated an openly hedonistic way of life. Duke William IX of Aquitaine (d. 1127) had been a Crusader in Spain but, disillusioned by what he considered Christian hypocrisies, came to scoff openly at Christianity, as did an anonymous French work titledAucassin and Nicolette. The German poet Walter von der Vogelweide (d. ca. 1236), although a monk, seemed ambivalent about Christian sexual morality.

Knight and Lady

But as it spread north, courtly love was modified in accord with attempts to christianize the warrior spirit through the code of chivalry, in which the lady was idealized and unattainable, while the knight served her unselfishly. The titles of “Our Lord” and “Our Lady”, which became the most familiar ways of speaking of Jesus and Mary, were an outgrowth of this, transferring to them absolutely the conditional fidelity owed to one’s feudal superiors. Pious knights vowed themselves to Mary’s service.

Liturgy

Western Rites

The basic form of the Mass had been set during the Carolingian period and, after being adopted at Rome, became known as the Roman Rite, with a few alternative Rites with minor variations: the Ambrosian in Milan, the Gallican in parts of France, the Mozarabic in Spain, and the Sarum in England.

Ex Opere Operato

A recurring heresy, dating at least as far back as the Donatists, held that the validity of the sacraments depended upon the personal worthiness of the priest. Medieval theologians countered this with the doctrine that, if celebrated according to proper form, the sacraments were valid ex opere operato (literally, “from the work having worked”), that is, through the power of the ordained priesthood, independent of the priest’s moral character.

Additions

There were further significant liturgical developments during the High Middle Ages. The Confiteor (“I confess”) became a regular part of the Mass after 1200, and the Gloria in the eleventh century, although for a time, except on Easter, it was sung only by the bishop. The Creed too was introduced during that century.

Major Elevation

By the thirteenth century, the congregation commonly knelt from the Sanctus until Communion and, amidst the silence of the Canon, were alerted to the impending consecration by the ringing of a bell. Whereas formerly the sacred elements had been shown to the people only at the end of the Canon (“Through Him, with Him, and in Him. . .”), the major elevation following the Consecration was now added. (The elevation of the chalice was not required until the sixteenth century, on the grounds that, when it was elevated, the faithful did not actually see the Blood of Christ.) Often the church bells were rung at the Consecration to signal to those outside the church that the miracle had occurred. At the end of the Canon, it was customary to bless various things connected with the people’s work—fruit, lambs, bread, milk, honey.

The “Last Gospel”

Certain devotions that were originally private, such as the prayers before Communion—“Lord, I am not worthy” and a second Confiteor—gradually came to be officially prescribed. The “Last Gospel” (the first chapter of John) was a medieval innovation in the Mass, recited by the priest, who, paradoxically, returned to the altar after the people had been formally dismissed. Originally, the recitation of John 1 was itself considered a blessing that could overcome illness or bring other favors, and this private devotion was incorporated into the liturgy because of its great popularity. (The “last blessing” by the priest also came after the dismissal, since it too was originally a private devotion.)

Liturgical Colors

During the thirteenth century, chasubles came to be made in various colors, to symbolize the liturgical seasons, and eventually the colors were standardized: white for the feasts of Christ and for virgins and confessors, red for martyrs, purple for the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent, green for the long period after Pentecost, black for the dead.

Place of the Laity at Mass

In larger churches, permanent rood screens, surmounted by crucifixes and other sacred images, were often erected to separate the nave from the sanctuary. The sheer size of some worshipping communities led to other significant changes, such as no longer administering the chalice to the laity. (But it was only in larger towns and monasteries that size presented a problem, since most people lived in villages, where Mass was celebrated in a rather small space, with the whole community present.)

Music

Music was also integral to divine worship in larger churches, an expression of the divine harmony of the universe itself, closely linked to the mathematics of the quadrivium; in Platonic terms, a means whereby the soul could rise above mundane things and enter the heavenly realm. Anselm, however, warned that music existed not for itself but in order to lure the listener into paying attention to the divine words, and Bernard, who was suspicious of all aesthetic pleasure, warned against music that obscured the scriptural texts it was meant to support.

Chanting was both in praise of God and to allow the spirit of the liturgy to penetrate deeply into the soul through repetition. Cluny pioneered the practice of placing its monks in choir stalls, two groups facing each other and chanting antiphonally (“against the sound”). Besides plain chant, increasingly elaborate polyphonic Masses were being composed in the thirteenth century, now often sung by professional lay choirs located in high lofts above the entrance of the church.

Sacred Drama

Drama grew directly out of the liturgy, originally with clerics in vestments enacting scenes from the Gospels in the body of the church. In time, plays were written on Gospel subjects and performed with increasing elaborateness by professional actors, spilling out of the church and into the town square.

Eucharistic Piety

Eucharistic piety grew increasingly fervent, as in the eucharistic hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas, “O Salutaris Hostia” (“O saving host”). The new feast of Corpus Christi (“Body of Christ”), with processions winding through the streets, was established in the thirteenth century, and the practice of exposing the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance (“showing”) a little later. But paradoxically, this piety accompanied a decline in the reception of Communion. Gazing prayerfully at the sacred elements became a kind of substitute, culminating in “spiritual communion” with Jesus in one’s heart.

Festivals

The liturgy was fundamentally joyous—the enactment of the redemption itself—and this joy spilled over into communal celebrations that took on a worldly, even profane, character. Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”) was a day on which people consumed whatever meat and lard they still had before the Lenten fast began, and in Latin lands it became carnival (“farewell to the flesh”), an excuse for riotous behavior.

Seven Sacraments

The word sacrament had always been used rather loosely, to refer to virtually any sacred thing. But the Fourth Lateran Council defined seven sacraments as the “visible forms of invisible reality” and the principal channels of divine grace, six of which were established by Jesus directly, while matrimony had been decreed by God in the Garden of Eden. Somewhat later, the term sacramental came to be used for objects, such as holy water and crucifixes, related to sacraments. The cope, which was originally a cape worn against the cold, and a shortened alb called the surplice (something “worn above”) were vestments worn by the priest at ceremonies other than the Mass itself.

Penance

In the eleventh century, the people might confess their sins openly at Mass and receive absolution. But for mortal sins, private confession was still required, and absolution was not ordinarily granted at the time of confession but only after the penitent had completed a very demanding penance.

The use of revised Penitentials spread, partly on the assumption that many priests were not skilled in the care of souls and needed to follow a guidebook that delineated the various sins and indicated how they were to be treated. For the same reason, the friars were given faculties to hear confessions, because they were often better educated than the diocesan clergy and were perhaps thought to be more devout, a policy that seemed to undercut the parish system and became a principal cause of animosity toward the friars. Absolute secrecy was enjoined on confessors, who were told not even to look at the penitent, and one of the gravest of all sins—reserved to the Holy See itself for absolution—was a confessor’s soliciting of sexual favors from a penitent.

Last Things

The Hour of Death

In the midst of growing prosperity, people remained highly conscious of death, continually exposed to the symbolism that showed the virtues contributing to salvation and the corresponding vices leading to Hell. Good and bad acts were both thought of as being kept meticulously in a book that was opened at the gates of Paradise, where angels weighed souls in a balance. The “hour of our death” was crucial, because it was at that final moment, as angels and devils fought over the soul of the dying man, that salvation or damnation was determined, the deathbed conversion of the sinner being one of the most dramatic and often-told stories.

People were judged immediately after death, a judgment that was ratified in the General Judgment at the end of the world. In keeping with Jesus’ warnings, the end times were dreaded, so that the poem Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) was eventually incorporated into the Mass for the dead. Cluny was the first community to celebrate the feast of All Souls, around 1050, and it was eventually extended to the entire Church, for a time the only feast on which a priest might celebrate more than one Mass.

Funerals

Funerals were as elaborate as a family could afford, and men sometimes provided in their wills for clergy or other people, such as orphans, to accompany the body, wrapped in a shroud and carried on an open bier, to the grave while praying or chanting psalms. Confraternities (“brothers together”) were societies established to ensure proper burial and prayers for their deceased members. The dismemberment of Aquinas’ body was not a unique occurrence. Important people sometimes made provision for different parts of their bodies to be interred at different locations with which they had been associated in life.

Prayers for the Dead

Funeral monuments commonly represented the deceased robed in the garments of his social rank, eyes closed and hands folded in peaceful eternal rest. But increasingly the monuments also displayed the image of a skeleton or a decaying body, reminders of the inevitability of death and judgment, something for which monks and others kept skulls close at hand. Tombs bore the names of the deceased and, most important, pleas to passersby to pray for their souls. Legacies were left to churches for the celebration of Masses, and the very rich set up endowments to support “Mass priests” (those without a regular benefice) whose sole duty was to pray for the soul of the donor. Special altars, and even whole chapels, were built onto churches for that purpose.

Last Will

The “last will and testament” was under the jurisdiction of the church courts because it was a witness (testament) to the will or wishes of the deceased, of the state of his soul at the time of death, hence an indication of his fate. The legacy was a crucial opportunity for manifesting one’s faith and doing penance for one’s sins, by leaving money for worthy purposes.

Sacred Architecture

The greatest manifestations of Christendom’s recovery after 1000 were in the realm of high culture, particularly architecture. With a few exceptions, such as Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, church-building declined during the Dark Ages but, soon after the symbolic date 1000 had been passed, a monk noted that the landscape was now dotted with the white stone of new churches. In some ways, the building of those Catholic megaliths was the most telling sign of the recovery of civilization.

The building of churches was a pious act in which people participated not only with their donations but by actually hauling stone and doing other manual labor, something in which even aristocratic ladies were said to participate. Church-building reflected the complex unity of the Christian society, in that, besides piety, it required wealth, technical skill, and civic pride. The great church, intended to last for centuries, was an act of faith not only in God but in the future of the city as well. (The names of some of the architects and artists are known, although in general their work was regarded as being done for God alone, not for public recognition.)

Byzantine

Eastern architectural styles survived in Italy, especially at Ravenna, which was the Byzantine capital in the West, and at Venice (St. Mark’s Basilica), because of its close commercial ties with the East. But the recovery of the West primarily manifested itself in new architectural styles.

Romanesque

Romanesque architecture began in the eleventh century, developing from the Roman basilica style but with much larger structures, some rising more than a hundred feet and holding several thousand worshippers. Great churches crowned with domes continued to be built in the East, but the West expressed its aspiration for God by building higher and higher, with towers and steeples pointing to Heaven. Besides great cathedrals and abbeys (Cluny in France, Winchester and Durham in England), Romanesque churches were built especially in southern France, along pilgrimage routes to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. To sustain their height, Romanesque churches had massive walls, huge pillars, and rounded ceilings. The interior walls were often painted with biblical scenes, and the columns were rich in sculpture, all of which had religious significance but also expressed the vivid imaginations of the artists: signs of the zodiac, exotic plants and animals, mythical monsters.

Gothic

The “Gothic” style of architecture, as it was later disrespectfully dubbed (see Chapter Eight below, p. 242), began at Suger’s Abbey of St. Denis in the earlier twelfth century. It was made possible by certain innovations in building techniques, especially the high vaulted arch of the roof and the “flying buttresses”—masonry structures that supported the walls from the outside, thereby alleviating the need for massive pillars on the inside. Like the Romanesque, the initial impression of the Gothic was of a building reaching up to Heaven. (The tower of Ulm in Germany was for centuries the tallest stone structure in the world.)

Divine Light

But the greater significance of the Gothic, in contrast to the Romanesque, was the lightness of its structure: slender soaring pillars and relatively thin walls, allowing those walls to be opened by several levels of windows, thereby infusing the interior with a richness of light not possible in Romanesque buildings, a natural light transformed as it passed through rows of stained-glass windows.

Chartres

The cathedral of Chartres, begun in 1194, is the most famous and best-preserved example of the Gothic, the circumstances of its construction perfectly expressing the spirit of medieval piety. After the old cathedral burned down, the townspeople at first considered it a divine judgment and decided not to rebuild. But when the town’s most celebrated relic, the cloak of the Virgin Mary, was found in the ruins, this was taken as a sign that they should erect an even greater structure.

Christ in Glory

Over the portals of many of the great churches was the triumphant scene of Christ reigning in glory and sitting in judgment over the souls of men, decreeing who would share in His heavenly glory and who would be cast into Hell. As worshippers entered the church, their minds were turned to the purpose of their existence on earth and the need to make themselves worthy to pass through the heavenly portals.

The Church as Book

The entire church building served as a course of instructions on the mystery of salvation, with both sculptured figures and painted glass representing characters from the Old Testament prefiguring the New, facing one another from opposite sides of the church: scenes from the life of Christ by which He redeemed the human race; the Evangelists who recorded the Good News; the contrasting wise and foolish virgins; saints who exemplified the true following of Christ; the choirs of angels; and both realistic and symbolic representations of the vices Christians had to eschew and the virtues they had to cultivate.

Expressing the sense of the unity of Christendom, the cathedrals included what might be considered secular scenes: banquets, hunts, events from history. Medieval sculptors occasionally produced male nudes and female figures (Eve), who, if not nude, were portrayed in sensuous poses. Apparently secular objects might have religious significance: the nut symbolizing Christ, whose divine nature is hidden under His human nature, just as the meat is hidden under the shell; the two wings of a dove symbolizing the contemplative and active dimensions of the spiritual life; the pelican as the Eucharist, because it was believed to feed its young with its own blood. Instruction took place on several levels simultaneously—picture stories for the unlearned, symbolism for the more sophisticated, and for everyone a perhaps largely subconscious imbibing of the underlying order of creation.

Cistercian Austerity

Cistercian churches, while they adopted Gothic verticality and lightness of structure, had plain glass windows, unadorned walls, and a minimum of statues, as Bernard railed against decorative religious art for distracting monks from the Scripture. He urged that money spent on decoration be given to the poor, although even he acknowledged that people in the world needed visible support for their faith.

Divine Proportion

Although less so than in the East, the interior of the church was intended to be itself an experience of Heaven, based on the metaphysics of light expounded by Pseudo-Dionysius, whom Suger and others thought was the same person as the patron of the great abbey. Gothic churches were built in accord with complex and precise geometrical relationships that were not merely aids to efficient construction but were thought to embody the underlying pattern of the universe itself, placed there by God and disclosed in the measurements of Solomon’s Temple. As Plato had taught, mathematical relationships allowed the mind to move beyond chaotic physical reality to the eternal order underlying it.

The quadrivium of mathematical sciences was especially important at the cathedral school of Chartres and directly influenced the development of the Gothic. The geometer’s tools—the compass and the ruler—were often depicted, and the number symbolism that came down from Augustine was embodied in all aspects of the church. Baptismal fonts, for example, were often octagonal, both because Christ was the “eighth day” of creation and because mankind was allotted seven ages from birth to death, and eight therefore symbolized new life. Sculptures of Christ and the saints were majestic and stylized, themselves ordered according to mathematical proportions, as befit the inhabitants of Heaven.

The Intellectual Renaissance

Monastic and Cathedral Schools

The monasteries remained the centers of intellectual life until the eleventh century, when, among other things, the increasingly complex requirements of the monastic liturgy left less time for study, and leadership passed to the cathedral schools located in towns. Anselm was still part of the monastic culture, but his work helped move theology away from that culture. He felt guilty about pondering philosophical problems while chanting the Divine Office and therefore avoided Cluniac houses. The one aspect of intellectual life where monks remained important was writing histories or chronicles, some of which, although composed for partisan purposes, are the only surviving detailed accounts of the events of their day.

School of Chartres

The “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” has been called the greatest of all such revivals, in that it marked the greatest progress within the shortest period of time. It was centered especially in the school of Chartres, under the direction of John of Salisbury, a Platonist who loved classical literature. But before long, intellectual life moved in a different direction from the Humanism of Salisbury, who warned that the emphasis on logic would bring about a decline in the study of the liberal arts, by making them seem insufficiently rigorous.

The Urge for Order

Fragmentary knowledge of Greek thought had survived through Boethius and Eriugena, especially the science of logic or dialectic. These parts of the trivium underlay the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages, creating a new way of thinking—abstract, technical, systematic—that came to be called Scholasticism, after the schools where it found its home.

In all aspects of life, there was a new urge for ordered systems. Scholasticism was the chief expression of this larger movement of increased rationality and self-consciousness, which also included the codification of canon law, the necessity of free consent to marriage, the outlawing of the ordeal in favor of the judgment of juries, and a formal process for canonizing saints according to some objective criteria rather than simply by popular enthusiasm.

Scholastic Theology

Scholastics sought to deepen and clarify doctrines by defining them more precisely, something that often involved unfamiliar subtleties of technical language as applied to the divine mysteries.

Transubstantiation

The monk Berengar of Tours (d. 1088), making use of Aristotelian terminology, was condemned for holding that, since the appearances (“accidents”) of bread and wine remain in the Eucharist after the Consecration, the underlying reality (“substances”) of bread and wine must also remain. He taught that the Body and Blood of Christ are present in that the “sign” changes—a symbol that is not merely a reminder but that makes present that which it signifies. Berengar’s formula prompted his opponents to insist that communicants actually tear the flesh of Christ with their teeth. (Berengar recanted, recanted his recantation, then recanted again.)

Lateran IV defined the doctrine of Transubstantiation (“substance crossing over” or changing), which was later developed by Aquinas’ teaching that the Eucharist is unique in being—miraculously—the sole case in which the unseen substance changes but the visible accidents remain the same. (In every other case, the reverse happens: the size or color of an apple may change, for example, but it remains the same apple.) Transubstantiation thus became the accepted Western way of understanding the Real Presence.

Faith Seeking Understanding

The Scholastic movement essentially began with Anselm, who pushed the method of logical analysis further than anyone had, up to his time. He defined theology as “faith seeking understanding”, in that the truths of faith can be neither proved nor disproved by human reason, but men are obliged to use reason to understand them as far as possible. Without minimizing the importance of Scripture, reason can venture where Scripture is either silent or unclear. Anselm especially used rational inquiry in his treatise Why God Became Man, where he tried to understand as far as possible the revealed truth of the Incarnation. Anselm’s argument for the existence of God was based on the idea of a perfect Being, no greater than which can be conceived by the mind. Such a being must exist, he argued, because perfection implies existence. Finite beings have perfections, but they must derive those perfections from an all-perfect Being, without whom the very idea of perfection would be unintelligible. The biblical claim, “The fool has said in his heart ‘there is no God’ ”, showed that atheism was a failure not of belief but of reason. According to Anselm, men do not “believe” in God; they know that He exists.

Essence and Existence

Anselm was the first philosopher to employ the Aristotelian distinction between essence and existence to understand God, essence being that which a thing is (a man), existence the fact that it is (a particular man). In God alone, existence and essence are the same, in that His essence is simply to exist, without limit, whereas creatures exist only in limited ways. Their essences are restricted by their existence, and limitations define each unique person in contrast to others.

Soteriology

In many ways, the Passion of Christ dominated Catholic piety in the two centuries prior to Anselm, including a deep sense of guilt over the human sinfulness that had crucified the Savior. Severe penances, such as those advocated by the monk-cardinal St. Peter Damian (d. 1072), were in part an attempt to repay the debt that sinners owed to God and to avert as far as possible God’s condemnatory judgment.

But to Anselm, no human recompense was possible. Based on Paul and Augustine, he proposed that mankind owed God an infinite, unpayable debt that only a man who was also divine could repay and which the second Person of the Trinity—freely and with infinite love—took upon Himself, suffering and dying to ransom mankind. Anselm also sought to resolve the issue of predestination, proposing that, since God exists in an eternal present rather than in time, His will and His foreknowledge are the same—nothing that He decrees is in the future; all is in the present.

Critics of Scholasticism

The Limits of Reason

Scholasticism did not immediately sweep all before it, since in many ways it was revolutionary. Theology continued to be primarily the study and exposition of Scripture, but it was now done in new ways. (Stephen Langton, while a professor in Paris, was the first to divide the Bible into chapters and verses.) Peter Damian opposed the growing dominance of logic on the grounds that it placed limits on God, who has the power even to undo what has already occurred and to make two contradictory things both true.

“The Last of the Fathers”

Bernard was the most severe critic of the new mode of theology, fearing that it substituted sterile intellectualism for the living teachings of the Fathers of the Church. Himself called the last of the Fathers, Bernard was also one of the last of the monastic theologians, for whom the dominant concern was the salvation of souls rather than the pursuit of knowledge. Bernard’s idea of knowledge was as much personal and affective as intellectual—humility (recognition of one’s lowliness) leads to charity (sympathy for other people), which leads to compassion (true sorrow), which prepares the way for heavenly contemplation.

Mystical Theology

The tradition of mystical theology persisted among the Cistercians throughout most of the Middle Ages. Bernard was familiar with the Eastern idea of the progressive deification of the believer, and he saw the mystical experience—the soul’s being taken out of itself and into God—as the culmination of the Christian life.

The monastery of St. Victor near Paris remained a center of a more traditional kind of theology. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1183) to some extent translated Augustinian ideas into Scholastic terms but deemphasized the power of reason by emphasizing the “cloud of darkness” that surrounds God. His colleague Walter of St. Victor (d. ca. 1180) actually cursed logicians: “May your dialectic be your damnation!”

Universities

The cathedral schools were also being superseded, because they functioned somewhat like modern secondary schools, primarily imparting basic knowledge, whereas the intellectual revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries required a new institution in which original thinking could take place. Thus the university was born.

Italy

Probably stimulated by contact with Greek and Arabic culture, Bologna and Salerno in Italy, followed by Naples and Padua, were the first universities, a term from Roman law that designated a corporate body—a legal person—with its own autonomy. Bologna was the center for canon law, but the other Italian universities were primarily lay institutions, chartered by city governments and organized as student communes for the study of the primarily lay subjects of law and medicine. These medieval institutions already contained the basic features of the modern university: specialized knowledge, three degrees (bachelor, master, doctor) denoting levels of competence, and a commitment to intellectual inquiry.

The Sorbonne

The University of Paris, called the Sorbonne after the bishop who first chartered it, grew out of the cathedral school of Notre Dame and was a university by 1200. Although it had a faculty of medicine, its curriculum was primarily church-related: liberal arts, theology, and canon law, the last probably being the most popular, because it led to employment in church bureaucracies. Oxford and Cambridge in England broke off from Paris in the earlier thirteenth century, and the new institution soon spread widely, with over eighty universities all over Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. The northern universities remained at least formally under the jurisdiction of the Church. (Gregory IX rebuked a bishop of Paris for not exercising sufficient oversight over the Sorbonne.)

The Profession of Theology

In the patristic period, a theologian was simply someone deemed wise and learned in the things of God; many were bishops who theologized as part of their pastoral responsibilities. But now a theologian was understood as one who had attained the proper academic credentials, and the dwindling number of bishop-theologians were men who had gained the latter status before achieving episcopal office. Theologians in effect became a kind of guild, their primary constituency being in the universities themselves.

The Demand for Rigor

The adaptation of Aristotelian logic to theology generated debates that were often even more subtle and difficult than those of the Fathers and that to some people seemed far removed from the spirit of the Gospel. But the stakes were very high—whether or not believing Christians could make use of their rational capacities to the fullest.

Following Aristotle, the Scholastics demanded not merely “opinion” or “probability” but “demonstration”—logical argument that was irrefutable. They adopted the method of disputation as their characteristic way of proceeding, sometimes in face-to-face debate between adversaries, sometimes in aggressive questioning of a master by his students, above all by the requirement that a thinker accurately state other positions and rebut them. The opinions of earlier thinkers were freely cited, but only as supporting evidence—appeals to authority could not defeat rational argument. (The Sentences of Peter Lombard [d. 1169] was one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages, a gathering together of the opinions by earlier philosophers and theologians, not for the purpose of settling those questions definitively but to serve as a basis for further exploration.)

The Queen of the Sciences

Scientia was the Latin word for “knowledge”, meaning certitude, and was roughly the equivalent of philosophy and by no means limited to the physical world. There was no clear separation between philosophy and theology. Philosophical ideas were explored as part of the study of theology, and theology was the “queen of the sciences”, because it involved the highest and most certain truths.

Faith and Reason

Since God gave man reason as the highest human power, no authentic discovery of reason was thought capable of denying a dogma of faith. However, since faith dealt with truths far above the human capacity to understand, it was reasonable to rely on faith for knowledge of supernatural mysteries. The dogmas of faith might then reveal ways in which reason had erred and might suggest answers to philosophical conundrums.

Universals

Scholasticism’s inquisitive spirit was first exercised over the question of the “universals”: how a general concept (“tree”) could be applied to myriad particular beings (trees). What may have seemed like a mere technical quibble proved to have deep implications. “Realists” held that the mind perceives in individual things a nature that really exists and that is common to all things of the same species, hence that the mind perceives “universals”, while “nominalists” held that the universals are merely names that the mind gives to things that resemble one another, without knowing their underlying reality.

Abelard

Peter Abelard (d. 1142) confirmed the misgivings that some people had about the new philosophy. At least by his own account, when he appeared as a student at Paris he drove his professor from the lecture hall by relentless questioning. A brilliant logician, Abelard was in love with his subject and determined to push it as far as he could, which was beyond the point that many people thought valid. He questioned the reality of universals, on the grounds that there are so many differences among the various beings of a particular species that they share no common nature, that “nature” is merely the mind’s attempt to impose order on endless variety Based on Lombard, he wrote a book called Yes and No, in which he pointed out what he considered to be unresolved contradictions among the opinions of previous thinkers.

Contrary to the prevailing theory of Anselm, Abelard seemed to deny the doctrine of the atonement and instead understood Christ’s death simply as a revelation of His infinite love, a position that was rejected as inadequate by Bernard and others. Struggling with the logical paradoxes of the doctrine of the Trinity, Abelard was accused of positing three gods and ultimately his work was condemned. (The iconoclastic theologian was protected to a degree by Bernard’s own sometime opponent Peter the Venerable.)

Abelard was also undone by a seemingly unrelated matter—his love affair with the niece of a prominent priest, a young woman named Heloise (d. 1164), whom Abelard made pregnant. He and Heloise were both banished to monasteries, where they spent most of the rest of their lives and later exchanged letters about the sublimation of human love into the divine. Ironically, Abelard became a reforming abbot, whose recalcitrant monks once put poison in his chalice at Mass.

The Rediscovery of Aristotle

A much greater crisis than that provoked by Abelard was the West’s rediscovery, in the later twelfth century, of not merely Aristotle’s logic but his whole philosophy, which had been preserved in libraries in the Near East and translated into Arabic by Muslim scholars. Ironically, since the West had lost almost all knowledge of Greek, it was from those Arabic translations that Christians in Spain first learned of the immensity of Aristotelian thought.

Serious thinkers therefore had to become Aristotelians, because Aristotle, whom Dante called simply “the master of those who know”, seemed to have offered the most complete and unified account of reality ever attempted, integrating its diverse aspects into a comprehensive system that included physics, psychology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and finally metaphysics (“beyond physics”)—the study of the ultimate nature of reality.

Athens and Jerusalem—Again

The Christian West was suddenly confronted with a comprehensive understanding of reality that was based entirely on reason and completely independent of religious faith, something that seemed to force them to choose between compromising their faith and abandoning their commitment to rational inquiry, a crisis comparable to that of the early Christians confronting classical paganism, when Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

Averroës and the Two Truths

The Muslim scholars who developed Aristotle’s thought—mainly the North African Avicenna (Ibn Sma, d. 1037) and the Spaniard Averroës (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198)—laid out a complete system that at key points was directly at odds with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam itself.

Averroës held that the Qur’an could be understood on several levels, depending on the intellectual sophistication of the reader. The various levels should not be confused, and no one should aspire to a level of understanding above his ability. This led to what was later called the “theory of the two truths”: what is true on one level of understanding might not be true at another, although each remains true in its own way. Averroës never explained how faith and reason could be reconciled, and his failure marked the beginning of a wide divergence between Muslim and Christian thought, to the point where Muslim thinkers, who in 1100 had been far in advance of Christians in the study of the physical sciences, increasingly abandoned speculation completely, in order to protect the integrity of their religion.⁶

Latin Averroism

“Latin Averroism” referred to Christians who continued to take Aristotle completely on his own terms and reached conclusions similar to Averroës’. It survived in the lay-governed Italian universities. But the mainstream of Christian philosophers held that faith and reason were both avenues to truth and, if followed correctly, could not contradict one another, so that any apparent contradiction showed that one side or the other had failed to follow its own method correctly. Thus the Scholastics, beginning in the late twelfth century, began revising Aristotle’s thought to bring it into harmony with divine revelation.

Albert

St. Albert the Great (d. 1280), a Dominican who taught at Paris and became archbishop of Cologne, was the first medieval thinker to accept philosophy as a self-contained discipline distinct from theology, a distinction that led him to teach that Aristotle’s “natural” human virtues precede supernatural virtues, thereby enabling pagans to lead good lives and possibly to be saved.

Aquinas

The principal achievement in reconciling Christianity and Aristotle belonged to Albert’s pupil Aquinas, an Italian Dominican who spent most of his professional life at Paris. For Aquinas, “grace builds on nature”, and the reconciliation of the two—the material with the spiritual, the temporal with the eternal—was his great achievement. Aquinas wrote the Summa contra Gentiles (The Highest Summary against the Gentiles [nonbelievers]) to prove the reasonableness of faith and the Summa Theologica (The Highest Summary of Theological Truth) to understand the faith more deeply.

God intended all men to be saved, assumed Aquinas, therefore truth must be knowable through reason. Human nature was damaged by sin, so that men see, in St. Paul’s words, only “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12, KJV), but they do retain the light of reason. Faith and reason cannot contradict one another, but the truths of God far transcend finite reason.

Unmoved Mover

Aquinas found the argument for the existence of God in Aristotle’s idea that the universe is a chain of causes, each dependent on the previous cause, all of them dependent ultimately on the Prime or Unmoved Mover or First Cause, an impersonal Being far removed from a personal God. The universe is eternal, because the Unmoved Mover is eternal and cannot change, thus its creative action must also be eternal.

Sense Knowledge

But Aristotle was also a materialist, as shown in his principle, “Nothing is in the mind unless it was first in the senses”, a claim that appeared to exclude even the possibility of knowing nonmaterial beings and in particular excluded the Platonic-Augustinian idea that the mind has innate knowledge of spiritual reality. Whereas earlier Christian theologians, following Plato, warned against immersion in the world of the senses, Aristotle seemed to say that such immersion was inescapable, which placed believers in a seemingly irresolvable dilemma, since, as the Bible asked rhetorically, “No one has ever seen God?” (Jn 1:18).

The abstruse concept of the “agent intellect”—the faculty by which the mind understands the nature of individual beings—proved to be an especially controversial issue. Avicenna believed that there is only one agent intellect and that it is shared by all men, a doctrine that implied the denial of the individual soul, which is merely part of a larger soul.

Daringly, Aquinas affirmed Aristotle’s principle that all knowledge begins with sense knowledge, without which the mind is a blank slate. Aquinas was a firm realist for whom each person’s agent intellect, through sense perception, perceives the true nature of things, the biblical doctrine of personal immortality implying that each person has a distinct agent intellect. So also, while the idea of an eternal universe might seem logical, Genesis showed that it was in error.

Whereas Augustinians believed that the soul is by nature oriented toward God, Aquinas followed Aristotle in seeing the mind as primarily oriented outward, toward the world. And whereas previous thinkers had treated the soul as an independent entity joined to a body, Aquinas saw the union of soul and body as fundamental, with the soul dependent on the body for knowledge.

But it was possible to get beyond sense knowledge, Aquinas affirmed, because in meditating on such knowledge the mind realizes that, as Aristotle also taught, there must be a chain of causes that brought sensible beings into existence. God is known through His effects in the world, and Aquinas proposed five “ways” by which to know His existence, each based on a particular kind of causality as defined by Aristotle, leading to an ultimate Uncaused Cause, which, Aquinas concluded, “we call God”. Aristotle had proven the existence of God without knowing that the Prime Mover was God. His Prime Mover—the First Cause—was revealed to be a personal, loving God who acts freely rather than out of necessity.

The Being of God

Following Anselm’s definition of God as uniting essence and existence, Aquinas took the words of God to Moses in the burning bush, “I Am Who Am” (Ex 3:14, NAB), as revealing that, in Aristotelian terms, God is “pure being”: that which exists fully and without limitation. Central to Aquinas’ thought was the “analogy of being”. Since God is the ultimate cause of all things, some of His perfections can be found in His creation, which reflects the perfection of God Himself, although in an imperfect way. This makes possible rational knowledge not only of God’s existence but of His nature, since He is the infinite and unlimited form of every good thing—all-just, all-knowing, all-loving, all-good. Like his predecessors, Aquinas espoused negative theology, whereby what is affirmed of God must also be denied of Him, since all human concepts are ultimately inadequate. Men know God through analogy, in that He is like His creation yet also unlike it, and He can be defined negatively—as without spatial or temporal limitations, as doing no evil.

The Primacy of the Intellect

Aquinas’ ethical theory departed from that of Augustine in holding that the will always desires good and that evil is less a perversion of the will than an error in understanding: the choice of an apparent good over a real one. The will naturally desires what is good, and the mind can know good, because good is that which accords with the divine order of creation. Thus according to natural law, reason understands moral right and wrong on the basis of the inherent purpose of human actions: fornication is wrong because the purpose of sex is the procreation of children; lying is wrong because the purpose of speech is to communicate truth.

The Thomistic Ascendancy

Along with Augustine, Aquinas was the most influential thinker in the history of the Catholic Church, the importance of whose achievement can hardly be exaggerated. He would in many ways dominate Catholic thought ever afterward, but his ideas remained to some extent controversial, especially his denial of the Augustinian idea of the direct divine illumination of the soul. Certain Scholastic positions were condemned by Church authorities shortly after Aquinas’ death, although for the most part those condemnations remained dead letters. Thomism survived and flourished, becoming the official Dominican system. But no school was completely dominant, and there was considerable debate among scholars, including some who remained Platonists in the face of the triumph of Aristotle.

Bonaventure

Bonaventure was the founder of a Franciscan theological tradition that was primarily Augustinian and that diverged from Aquinas in certain important ways. According to Bonaventure, the mind does see images of God in the world but understands them only by looking within itself, where it receives direct divine illumination and is impelled by a love that draws the soul inexorably toward God in mystical contemplation. Since this requires the free response of the individual, Bonaventure’s theology was also Augustinian in giving primacy to the will over the intellect in the discovery of truth.

Physics

Physics was a recognized branch of Greek philosophy and was studied even in the Dark Ages. The School of Chartres took considerable interest in the subject, mainly in Platonic terms, and Euclid’s geometry was rediscovered at the same time as Aristotle’s philosophy, both giving new impetus to the study of nature. Medieval philosophy created the intellectual environment which made the scientific study of nature possible, in that nature had been created by the all-powerful God who stood above His creation, meaning that nature itself did not partake of divinity and thus could be studied objectively. While understanding the universe as part of the ultimate divine order, medieval thinkers sought to explain it as far as possible in natural ways, minimizing direct divine intervention.

Monotheism assumed an underlying order to the universe, which men were endowed by the Creator with the ability to discover. Medieval science anticipated modern science in some ways. Albert the Great was an observant botanist, for example. Some philosophers speculated that the universe was composed of atoms, and others struggled toward a concept of gravity.

The Universe

Most educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was round and the universe made up a series of concentric spheres, that of the earth being the lowest, surrounded by other spheres that were increasingly rarified as they rose closer to the heavens. Matter was understood in terms of its various substances, primarily earth, air, fire, and water. Supernatural magic was from the devil and hence condemned, but “natural” magic was the discovery, by reason and experiment, of the hidden secrets of nature, a study (alchemy) that was in some ways a forerunner of modern experimental science.

Mathematics

Aristotle thought it possible to understand the world through the nature of each being, trying to understand the motion of the arrow, for example, by speculating about something within the arrow. It was an approach that ultimately proved unfruitful, and its chief defect was its neglect of mathematics, which was a characteristically Platonic rather than Aristotelian pursuit. Plato thought that concrete beings, as mere shadows of transcendent “forms”, did not possess a nature of their own and could therefore be studied only by the mathematical measurement of their behavior.

Grosseteste

The Franciscans were more mathematically inclined, perhaps because their philosophical approach was more Augustinian, hence more Platonist, than the Dominicans. The English Franciscan bishop and philosopher Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) accepted the Pseudo-Dionysian belief that the universe was constituted by the emanation of light from a divine source, but he also approached light in a scientific way and saw the importance of empirical observation.

Bacon

His pupil Roger Bacon (d. 1292), also a Franciscan, also engaged in empirical observation, invented a kind of telescope, and urged that technology be used to improve the conditions of human living. He was imprisoned for a time, possibly for practicing astrology, but he was not a religious skeptic—to the contrary, he urged the Church to use science in the struggle against infidels.

Medieval Technology

In Bacon’s day, China was probably the most technologically advanced society in the world, but the West was in the process of surpassing it through practical innovations in building, navigation, weaponry, and agriculture, as well as miscellaneous inventions like eyeglasses. The Church herself made extensive use of technology, especially in building, and only condemned the occasional invention, such as the catapult or the crossbow, which were deemed too destructive. (The condemned weapons continued to be used anyway, even on the Crusades.)

The Scholastic Achievement

Like the Fathers of the Church who embraced classical learning, the Scholastics had a profound effect on Western civilization, in developing and handing on the Greek tradition of critical thinking. Scholasticism, a comprehensive system that sought to understand every aspect of reality in relation to the whole, expressed the idea of Christendom itself, the organization of the entire universe according to an overriding spiritual principle.

The Divine Comedy

This sense of unity was carried to its highest point by Dante, whose Divine Comedy, written in the early fourteenth century, was the most vivid expression of that ideal, bringing together abstract doctrine and concrete humanity in a great imaginative unity, an epic drama that revealed the divine plan and the way in which divine justice governed the universe.

In the Comedy, Dante, lost and spiritually imperiled by his illicit and unrequited love for the memory of a deceased married womannamed Beatrice, received from God—at Beatrice’s entreaty—the guidance of the Roman poet Virgil, who took him on a tour of Hell and Purgatory to show him the reality of sin. (Heaven and Hell are described only vaguely in the Bible, and the Catholic image of those places derives in great part from the Divine Comedy.)

Hell

Dante’s tour of Hell revealed that punishment for sin was not an arbitrary divine decree but rather the patterns of human behavior carried into eternity, with the sinner suffering in ways that were the natural and inevitable results of his earthly the gluttonous force-fed to the point of continuously regurgitating their food; the hypocrites weighed down by heavy leaden robes that appeared beautiful on the outside. The men and women in Hell were shown to be not so much damned by God as having damned themselves, by refusing to repent of their choices and accept the grace that would have enabled them to overcome their vices either during their lives on earth or in Purgatory.

The Hierarchy of Sins

Dante delineated a hierarchy of sins that, as a Thomist, he based on human reason. Thus the worst sins were lying, deceit, and treachery—the use of the intellect to subvert the truth rather than to disclose it. Those guilty of such sins, especially Judas, were trapped in ice in the lowest depths of Hell, because of their calculating and unloving acts of betrayal.

Purgatory

An equivalent array of sinners were in Purgatory, where, however, they had the joy of the certainty of eventual salvation, their crucial difference from the souls in Hell being the fact that they had repented and accepted divine mercy. The sufferings of Purgatory were not so much punitive as therapeutic, purifying the soul and making it worthy of Paradise.

Heaven

Virgil could show Dante the nature of evil because, as a good pagan, the Roman poet understood the natural law. But also as a pagan, he could not enter Heaven, at whose gates Beatrice herself became Dante’s guide, since by her prayers Dante’s disordered human love had been transformed into an understanding of divine love.

Beatrice guided Dante through the levels of Paradise on an upward spiritual journey that was the reverse of his journeys through Hell and Purgatory. The experience of Paradise was overwhelmingly that of a light so bright that it obscured much of what Dante encountered, of which he was not as yet worthy. In his spiritual ascent, he encountered the great saints, who by their words and deeds illustrated the hierarchy of virtues. His final guide in Paradise was St. Bernard (Dante as author giving him the honor of that role because Bernard had reached the heights of contemplation and because of his deep devotion to the Virgin Mary). Dante was finally drawn upward to the ultimate union of love with truth: “Like a wheel that as a whole rotates, my yearning and my will were borne along by the love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”

Dante revealed the ordered unity of the cosmos itself, the linkage between Heaven and earth. But his great poetic synthesis was created at the very point when Christendom was on the verge of unraveling.