Glossary
A
Abbot/abbess
Superior of a monastery or nunnery; derived from Syriac word abba, 'father’.
Albigensians
Name for dualist heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; derived from the city of Albi in southern France, one of their centres of influence; also called Cathars (see below).
Apostolic life
The way of life of the apostles, emphasising their poverty and preaching; a powerful religious ideal, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Apostolic succession
The doctrine that the authority of Jesus was passed down in an unbroken line from the apostles to their successors, the bishops.
Arianism
View defended by Arius, a fourth-century priest in Alexandria, that Jesus was not the same as God, but was the greatest of all creatures; Arianism was the version of Christianity held by important Germanic kingdoms, including the Visigoths and the Lombards, between the fifth and seventh centuries.
B
Baptism
The first sacrament; the gateway to membership both in the church and in medieval Christian society. The ritual of baptism was thought to wash away the original sin inherited from Adam; the overwhelming majority of those baptised were infants.
Beguines/beghards
Since the twelfth century, a name for pious women who lived in small voluntary groups for religious purposes, but did not take religious vows. They were free to own property, to leave the group and to marry. Beghards were men who lived the same sort of life. They were prominent in the Low Countries and the Rhineland; sometimes suspected by church authorities of heresy.
Benefice
An endowed church office.
Bishop
A church officer consecrated to the highest of the holy orders; usually the head of a diocese with spiritual authority over the other clergy and laity in that diocese; believed to be a successor to the apostles; word derived from the Greek episcopos, ‘overseer’.
Black Death
Bubonic plague that ravaged Europe and Asia in the mid-fourteenth century and reappeared periodically in Europe for generations.
Byzantine Empire
The eastern Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople; it was closely intertwined with the Greek Orthodox Church; the empire’s long history of advance and retreat ended in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.
C
Canon
A clergyman who belonged to a cathedral chapter or collegiate church. Those who observed a written rule, often the Rule of St Augustine, were called regular canons. Those who held personal property and lived in their own houses were called secular canons.
Canon law
The body of rules governing the faith, morals and organisation of the church.
Canon (New Testament)
The list of books accepted by the church as scripture; the accepted list of 27 items in the New Testament was worked out between the second and the fourth centuries.
Catechumen
a person receiving instruction on the Christian religion in preparation for baptism.
Cathars
Dualist heretics active in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly in southern Europe; the word derives from the Greek word catharos, ‘pure’; also called Albigensians.
Catholic Church
Derived from the Greek word catholicos, ‘universal’; adopted in the second century by one group of Christians to distinguish themselves from their rivals, particularly the gnostic Christians; more generally, ‘Catholic’ describes those Christian groups which accept the ancient creeds, including Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Anglicans.
Celibacy
The state of being unmarried; required of western clergy in the major orders (bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon) since the twelfth century.
Christendom
The collective name for those territories inhabited primarily by Christians.
Cistercians
A variety of Benedictine monks, who appeared as a reform movement in 1098 and flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; they advocated a return to the strict, literal observance of Benedict’s Rule; name derives from Citeaux, the first monastery of the order; also called white monks because of the undyed wool in their garments.
Clergy
A collective term for men having any of the holy orders (see below) of the Christian church, as distinguished from the unordained members of the church, who were called the laity.
Cluny
A monastery in Burgundy founded in 909; famous for its magnificent liturgy; during the eleventh century Cluny became the head of the first monastic order, with hundreds of monasteries all over Europe.
Conciliarism
The doctrine that the supreme authority in the church is vested in a general or ecumenical council; conciliarism was extremely influential during and after the Great Schism (1378-1414), especially at the Councils of Constance (1414-18) and Basel (1431-49).
Confirmation
A sacrament that confirmed the ritual of baptism through an anointing with holy oils; in the later church confirmation became associated with adolescence.
Conversus
a) A person who entered a monastery as an adult, in contrast to an oblate who entered as a child; or b) a lay brother in a monastery.
Councils
Ecclesiastical meetings of several sorts, including a) a meeting of bishops with their archbishop or metropolitan, called a provincial council;
- a meeting of a bishop with his diocesan clergy, called a diocesan synod;
- a meeting of all (at least in theory) bishops under the emperor or the pope, called an ecumenical council; almost a synonym for ‘synod’.
Creed
A brief formal statement of belief; the most famous were the Apostles’ Creed, the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene Creed.
Crusades
Military expeditions, traditionally eight in number, undertaken between 1095 and 1271 to win or hold the Holy Land against Muslim rulers; term extended to other military expeditions undertaken to defend or spread Christianity. The word ‘crusade’ was derived from the cross (crux) which crusaders sewed on their clothing.
D
Deacon
A clergyman holding the holy order just below the priesthood.
Decretal
A papal letter or an excerpt from one that rules on a point of canon law.
Decretum
A major collection of canon law texts arranged topically by the monk Gratian in the 1140s; used in church courts and law schools from the twelfth century onward. The formal title of the book was the Concordance of Discordant Canons.
Diocese
An ecclesiastical division of territory under the supervision of a bishop; there were more than 500 dioceses in the western church by the fourteenth century.
Divine Office
The religious services sung or recited by priests and religious at the canonical hours, i.e. seven fixed times during each day and once during the night.
Dualism
The theological view that the universe is divided between two radically different powers, one good and one evil; groups holding dualistic views included Gnostics in the ancient church and Cathars during the Middle Ages.
E
Easter
The religious celebration of Christ’s resurrection held on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March. It was the oldest and greatest annual Christian religious feast.
Ecumenical
An adjective meaning ‘universal’, derived from the Greek word oikoumene, ‘the inhabited world’ or ‘the whole world’.
Eucharist
The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; the mass; or the consecrated bread and wine; derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to give thanks’.
Evangelical
Adjective meaning ‘pertaining to the gospels’; derived from the Greek word euangelion, ‘good news’, which was an early Christian description of their message and a term for the books - gospels - in which that message was recorded.
Excommunication
The formal suspension or expulsion of a person from the communion of the church; in the Middle Ages excommunication had serious social and legal consequences.
Extreme unction
A sacrament by which members were prepared for death through prayer and the anointing of oil; sometimes called ‘last rites’.
F
Flagellants
During the fourteenth century, some believed the plague to be punishment from God; they organised great processions of flagellants (from Latin flagellare, to whip), who inflicted wounds on themselves to make satisfaction for human sin.
Friars
Term for members of the mendicant (begging) orders founded in the thirteenth century, especially Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites; derived from the Latin word frater, ‘brother’.
G
Gospel
Originally, the ‘good news’ of Jesus; then a word for certain documents telling of Jesus’s life and teachings; there were numerous early Christian gospels of which four - those attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - were regarded as canonical by the second century.
H
Heretic
A person who obstinately holds to a view that is contrary to one or more of the fundamental beliefs of the church; it is not mere error, but obstinate holding to the error when instructed by a properly constituted authority.
Hermit
A person who leaves society for religious motives; a solitary religious often contrasted to monks who lived in a community of some sort; the word is derived from the Greek word eremos, ‘desert’, which was a favoured place for the withdrawal of eastern Mediterranean hermits.
Holy orders
A sacrament reserved for the clergy (as opposed to the laity), by which certain members of society were set apart for God’s service by becoming priests, monks, friars, etc.
I
Icon
A sacred image or picture of Christ or a saint; venerated with particular fervour in the Greek Orthodox tradition.
Iconoclasm
The destruction of icons; iconoclasm was a policy of some Byzantine emperors between 725 and 842; eventually repudiated by the Christian churches of the medieval east and west.
Immaculate Conception
The doctrine that Mary had been born free from Eve’s original sin, thus making her worthy to be the virgin mother of Jesus; not to be confused with the virginal conception of Jesus through the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb (see below).
Incarnation
The manifestation of God’s son, Jesus Christ, becoming a human being on Earth; it derives from a Latin word meaning 'to be put into flesh’. The doctrine of the incarnation claims that Jesus became human so that he could be sacrificed for human salvation.
Investiture
The act of formally putting someone into an office or a landholding; it was a major occasion of dispute in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when reformers opposed lay rulers who invested clergy with the symbols of their positions.
Islam
The religion founded by the Arab prophet Mohammed (570-632); an Arabic word meaning 'submission to the will of God’.
J
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K
N/A
L
Laity
The unordained people of the church, as distinct from the clergy; derived from the Greek word laos, 'the people’.
Last Judgement
The doctrine that Jesus would return to Earth in a 'Second Coming’, during which time dead bodies would rise and be reunited with their souls, and all would be judged by Jesus, receiving what they deserved.
Legate
A representative or ambassador, usually a cardinal, sent by the pope to represent him in a particular territory or for a particular purpose.
Liturgy
The formal prayers and rituals in the church, including such things as the mass, the divine office and the anointing of kings.
M
Mendicants
Beggars; the term referred to members of religious orders who were forbidden to own personal or community property and were required to live on charity; they sometimes sought their income by begging; mendicant is another term for such friars as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites.
Monk
Generally, a man who joined a religious house, called a monastery, where he took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience; the commonest form of monk was a man living under the provisions of the Rule of St Benedict.
Muslim
A follower of the religion of Islam; also spelled Moslem.
N
National monarchy
A form of government that arose in the thirteenth century in western Europe; a king and his bureaucracy gained effective control over the loyalty and taxes of their subjects, often at the expense of the church; the most successful medieval national monarchies were those of England and France.
O
Oblate
A child who was offered to a monastery by his/her parents; the practice was already recognised in the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict, and was legislated out of existence in the late twelfth century by the popes; often contrasted to a conversus, one who entered monastic life as an adult.
Original sin
A doctrine by which Adam and Eve lost their privileged status in paradise, after which this punishment was passed on to all of their human descendants, causing human life ever since to be filled with troubles.
Orders (minor/major)
The grades or steps of the Christian ministry; the so-called minor orders were acolyte, lector, exorcist and doorkeeper; the so-called major orders, which bound their holders to celibacy, were bishop, priest, deacon and subdeacon.
Orthodox Church
The dominant form of Christianity in the Byzantine Empire and in the Slavic lands converted from that empire. Its leaders were the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch; after 1054 the Orthodox churches broke with the fifth patriarch, the bishop of Rome and refused to recognise his authority. Orthodoxos is a Greek word meaning ‘right belief’.
P
Paradise
The home of Adam and Eve; a place posited in the book of Genesis, free from pain, toil and hunger; the metaphoric image of human life as it could have been.
Parish
Generally a subdivision of a diocese; administered by a resident priest who might have other clergy as his assistants; it was the basic unit of ordinary church life in western Europe.
Peace of God
A movement that arose in southern France in the tenth and eleventh centuries to place limits on fighting; it placed certain classes of people - non-combatants, women, clergy and the poor - under the protection of the church and threatened those who used violence against them with excommunication; see Truce of God.
Penance
The sacrament though which sin could be remedied, through heartfelt regret (contrition), confession and a reparation to the person wronged as well as to God (satisfaction).
Pilgrimage
A journey to a holy place for the purpose of worship or thanksgiving or doing penance; there were many local, regional and universal sites that drew pilgrims in the Middle Ages; among the greatest pilgrim destinations were the places connected with Jesus’s life in the Holy Land, the city of Rome and the shrine of St James at Compostela.
Pluralism
The holding by one person of more than one church office or benefice at the same time; it was a favourite way for secular and church officials to support their bureaucrats; in the later Middle Ages it was a widespread abuse.
Pope
Derived from papa, 'father’; originally a term for any bishop; in the west it came to be restricted to the bishop of Rome, who, as successor of St Peter, was regarded as the chief bishop of the church; in the west, the pope became the dominant figure in the governance of the church; in the Orthodox churches that position of dominance was rejected.
Priest/presbyter
A man who held the second highest of the holy orders, after that of bishop and above that of deacon; term derived from the Greek word presbuteros, 'elder’.
Prior
In Benedictine monasteries, the second in command after the abbot; also a term for the head of a religious house that did not have the legal status of a monastery.
Private church
A church owned by a landlord or a monastery; most rural churches were founded by the owner of the land on which they stood and remained under the control of his family; sometimes called a proprietary church.
Provision
Nomination or appointment to a church office; in the fourteenth century the papacy gained the right of provision over thousands of church offices all over Europe.
Q
Quadrivium
Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music; the scientific subjects in the seven liberal arts; the three literary subjects were called the trivium (see below).
R
Regular clergy
Monks, canons, friars and other clergy who lived in communities under a rule; word derived from the Latin word regula, 'rule’; often contrasted with the secular clergy, the bishops and priests who worked in the world.
Relic
An object venerated by believers because it was associated with a saint; a relic could be something owned by the saint, such as a piece of clothing or a book, but more often was a part of the saint’s body.
Religious
When used as a noun, it is a general term to encompass any person bound to monastic life by vows; it could be used to describe a monk, a canon, a friar or a nun.
Reliquary
A chest, box or shrine, often elaborately decorated, in which a saint’s relics were kept. Reliquaries were often the focal point of pilgrimages.
S
Sacrament
A ritual by which the church mediates God’s grace to its members; the medieval church developed seven sacraments, which are generally associated with various stages of life: baptism, confirmation, penance, communion (Eucharist), holy orders (entering religious life), marriage, extreme unction (last rites).
Schism
A formal split in the church over a disagreement about a matter of practice; distinct from heresy because the split is not over belief; the schism of 1054 marked the formal break between Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church; the Great Schism (1378-1414) was the split in the western church between those loyal to the pope at Rome and those loyal to the pope at Avignon; derived from the Greek word schisma, ‘split or tear’.
Secular clergy
The clergy who were not separated from the world by a written rule or by life in a monastic community; it included the bishops and priests who worked with the laity; often contrasted to the regular clergy who lived under a rule; word derived from saeculum, ‘world’.
Simony
The buying or selling of sacred things, such as sacraments and ecclesiastical positions; word derived from Simon the Magician (Acts 8:18-24), who tried to buy spiritual power from St Peter.
Synod
An ecclesiastical meeting; see definitions under ‘council’; word derived from Greek synodos, ‘a coming together’.
T
Tithe
The payment of a tenth of one’s income to support the church and the clergy; based on texts in the Old Testament books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and made mandatory in the eighth century by the Carolingian kings Pepin and Charlemagne.
Tonsure
A clipping of hair or shaving the top of the head; tonsure was the ceremony that dedicated a person to God.
Translation
a) To move a bishop from one diocese to another; b) to move a saint’s relics from one place to another, often from the original burial place to a reliquary.
Trinity
The doctrine of one God in three persons: Father, Son and Spirit.
Trivium
Grammar, rhetoric and logic, the literary components of the seven liberal arts; the other four subjects were called the quadrivium (see above).
Truce of God
A movement that began in the eleventh century which sought to forbid fighting on Sundays and the chief religious seasons and feasts; see Peace of God.
U
Utraquism
(From the Latin sub utraque specie, ‘in both kinds’), was a doctrine which maintained that the Eucharist should be administered ‘in both kinds’, bread and wine, to everyone, even laypeople. Standard church practice only allowed the wine to priests. Utraquism began with the followers of Jan Hus in Prague in the early fifteenth century. In 1415, the Council of Constance banned the practice, condemned Hus and burned him at the stake.
V
Vicar
In the basic meaning, a person who substitutes for another; in many medieval parishes the resident priest was not the legal holder of the parish; the legal holder was a non-resident person or was a monastery and the resident priest was the vicar for the legal holder, who carried out the latter’s duties in return for a portion of the parochial income.
Virgin conception/birth
The doctrine that Jesus was miraculously conceived in Mary’s womb through the presence of the Holy Spirit, rather than through sexual intercourse with her husband Joseph.
Vows
Formal, voluntary promises to God. Any adult could make a vow, and it was common practice in medieval religion. However, vows are usually associated with those who entered religious houses. By the central Middle Ages, the vows of monks, nuns, regular canons and friars usually involved promises of poverty, chastity and obedience.
W
Waldensian
A follower of Peter Waldo (Valdes), a twelfth-century advocate of the apostolic life, who eventually broke with the church over his claim to the right to preach without authorisation.
X
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Y
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Z
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Chapter 1 - The Basics of Christianity
The basics of Christianity
In spite of this chapter’s title, the ‘basics of Christianity’ were not and are not eternal and unchanging, at least not historically speaking. Christian believers, both medieval and modern, might claim otherwise, but there is a difference between belief in a doctrine of faith and what the historical narrative tells us. One is not necessarily better than the other; they are simply two different things. Our goal in this chapter is to introduce some basic concepts of historical Christianity as they developed in the medieval church, and to place those ‘basics’ in their historical context. Grasping these concepts will help the reader to understand what follows in the rest of this book. Whether these next few pages serve as review, or as a first introduction to Christianity, keep in mind as you read that historical Christianity developed and changed throughout the Middle Ages, and continued to change, subject to constant amendment by various groups of Christians up to the present day.
The ‘basics’ of Christianity include its doctrines on the creation of the universe, the creation and fall of humankind, Satan, the angels, heaven and hell, redemption, the incarnation of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the nature of Eve and Mary, and the Last Judgement.
I. The creation of the universe
Christianity borrows many of its doctrines from the Hebrew Scripture, what Christians call the Old Testament. According to the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis 1:1 (chapter 1, verse 1), ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. This idea seems simple enough, but the earliest Christian theologians questioned it. Did God create everything in the universe out of something else? Or was everything created out of nothing? Even in pre-Christian times, Greek and Jewish philosophers had struggled with the concept of creation. The Greek philosopher Plato (429-347 BC) suggested that nothing comes into existence without a cause. He posited a ‘demiurge’ - from a Greek word meaning artisan or craftsman - who had not necessarily created everything out of nothing, but took what existed in a state of chaos and created order from it. Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-AD 50), a Hellenistic Jew, saw Plato’s ‘first cause’ as the creator God in Genesis. The Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215) tried to keep the biblical idea of creation from initial chaos, citing the book of Wisdom 11:17: ‘Your all-powerful hand, which created the world out of formless matter.’ In the late second century, Theophilus of Antioch was arguably the first Christian thinker to deny the existence of the chaotic state of matter before creation, arguing instead that God had created the universe ex nihilo, from a Latin phrase meaning ‘out of nothing’. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) - whose influence as a Christian writer spanned the Middle Ages and beyond - borrowed from these earlier thinkers and created a doctrine of creation that would have a long hold on the medieval church. Augustine supported the idea of creation ex nihilo, even claiming that God had created time itself, which meant that there was no such thing as ‘before creation’. God had always been. He summoned ex nihilo all that existed. He was not compelled to create the world, but the created world was still sustained by him for every instant of its existence.1 Augustine’s concept of creation stuck, and was even confirmed in 1215 by the church’s Fourth Lateran Council.
II. The creation and fall of humankind
The book of Genesis goes on to include the origin of humans. This fascinating tale of creation - of the universe, of Adam and Eve - has been complicated by a learned tradition of explaining or even explaining away some of its stories. For example, there are two biblical accounts of creation (Gen. 1 and 2:1-4, and Gen. 2:5-23), which became harmonised into a single narrative. According to this narrative, God created the visible universe during six ‘days’, though Augustine and other early thinkers did not believe these could have been the 24-hour days experienced by humans. On the sixth day God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves.’ The first man, Adam, was created from dust and received life from God’s breath. He was placed in a wonderful garden, a paradise, where he had control over the rest of creation and enjoyed a sort of human perfection, free from suffering and death, though he was lonely since he was the only one of his kind. In response to his need, God created a companion, Eve, from Adam’s rib. The paradise of Adam and Eve, with its innocent nakedness and its freedom from pain, toil and hunger, was the image of human life as it could have been.
Genesis 3:1-21 explains why humans no longer live in a paradise, and why they must suffer and die. God had instructed Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, but, tempted by a serpent, they disobeyed God and ate the fruit. Because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve lost their health and immortality. Whether or not there had been sexual activity in paradise, there certainly was after the expulsion, and it was so shameful that Adam and Eve covered their nakedness, which had not troubled them before their sin of disobedience. Eve bore children in physical pain and Adam gained food by hard physical work. God expelled them from the garden and condemned them to suffer pain, hard work, death and the other ills that are so prominent in the lives of their descendants. The consequences of their sinful rebellion were summed up in the notion of a ‘Fall’ from God’s grace, which led theologians to develop two related doctrines: one on original sin, and one on free will.
According to the doctrine on original sin, when Adam lost his privileged status in paradise, this punishment was passed on to all of his descendants, meaning the entire family of humankind. In short, human life, with all its troubles, was the way it was because of the first parents’ sin of disobedience, which damaged all succeeding generations. Augustine was one of the main promoters of this doctrine, but he was opposed by a group of theologians collectively known as Pelagians. A monk named Pelagius (c.354-c.430) and his followers posited that the human descendants of Adam and Eve were not affected by original sin. They argued that even if Adam had not sinned, he still would have died, and that Adam’s sin only affected himself, not the whole human race. Augustine’s ideas won out, however, when the Councils of Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431) condemned the Pelagian teachings as heresy.
Connected to the doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of free will. If God is omniscient, then he must have known what decision Adam and Eve were going to make regarding the forbidden fruit. If that were true, then how freely did Adam and Eve make their decision? Were they simply predestined to act out some divine plan? If the latter is true, then how could Adam and Eve, and subsequent generations, be held accountable for their actions? Here again, Augustine was the theologian who exercised the greatest influence on this doctrine, though his writings can seem contradictory. He claimed that humans absolutely have free will, but also that God, because he is omnipotent, has power over human will. A theologian named Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) attempted to reconcile some of Augustine’s teachings. Concerning God’s omniscience - which would give him foreknowledge of all human actions - Aquinas argued that God existed outside of time, making past, present and future all equal in God’s view. God sees everything at once, in a single comprehensive act, like a person looking down from a high mountain at a traveller below, who can see the inevitable path the traveller will take, even though the traveller maintains her free will to make choices.
III. Satan, the angels, heaven and hell
In the events leading to the Fall of Adam, one of the indispensable players in the Christian story made his debut. Even though Adam and Eve had chosen to disobey, that was not the entire story of the world’s evils. The Christian tradition traces evil not only to human psychology and choice, but also to a person, a bitter enemy of humans: Satan (from a Hebrew word meaning ‘the adversary’), or the devil (from a Greek word meaning ‘the slanderer’). Satan had taken the form of a serpent in paradise. He had tempted Eve with the promise that eating the fruit of the forbidden tree would make her and Adam like gods, who could differentiate between good and evil.
Satan became a central character in the Christian understanding of the moral universe, yet his appearance in Genesis was abrupt and seemed to require an explanation. In fact, the name Satan does not appear in the book of Genesis (the first appearance of the name is in 1 Chronicles 21:1). Genesis simply describes a serpent; later theologians interpreted the serpent to be Satan. Out of other bits and pieces in the Bible, medieval theologians gradually accounted for Satan’s existence in the following way. In addition to the visible world, God had created an invisible world populated by spiritual beings, called seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels. These were eventually regarded as the nine choirs who sang God’s praises. Christian tradition has a great deal to say about the lowest spirit beings, the archangels and angels, because their activities were described in both the Old and New Testaments, where they appeared as messengers from God to human beings. Indeed, the Greek word for a messenger was angelos. A few of the angels had names known to humans (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael), but the overwhelming majority were anonymous. Before the creation of the visible world, some angels rebelled against God, led by a highly placed angel named Lucifer, which meant ‘the bearer of light’. The usual explanation for their sin was their pride and unwillingness to serve their creator. After a tremendous battle in heaven, the forces of loyal angels led by the archangel Michael defeated the rebels and cast them out. Thus there was a Fall in the heavenly realm that paralleled Adam’s Fall in the world of material creation. The defeated angels were transformed into devils and their leader Lucifer became Satan, the adversary of God and of humans.
Each kind of being - angel, human, devil - had its natural place in the created universe, with three interrelated zones to accommodate them, arranged like a three-storey building. The top floor was heaven, where God lived with the choirs of angels and holy, deceased human beings, known as saints. The middle floor was the earth, where humans lived. The lowest floor was hell, the underworld, where Satan, the devils, and the damned human beings lived. There was a constant flow of traffic between the middle zone and the other two. While this idea is supported biblically, over time, theologians also debated and developed doctrines concerning heaven and hell. For example, twelfth-century theologians reading Aristotle’s works on the make-up of the universe attempted to figure out where, exactly, heaven was located. They also developed doctrine on a place called purgatory - whose biblical roots are still a matter of debate - where sinners who were not quite bad enough to go to hell could purge their sins and eventually be admitted into heaven.
IV. The process of redemption
Even though Adam had sinned and been severely punished, God did not abandon humanity entirely. He planned to offer human beings a way back to his favour, though it would take centuries to work it out. God had a plan to reveal himself again to fallen humanity and to save at least some humans from their inherited sin. In the generations after Adam’s Fall, his descendants had gone from bad to worse. In Genesis 6:9-9:17, God sent a flood to destroy all but Noah, a just man, and his family. After the flood, God made a covenant, that is, an agreement, that he would never again destroy the natural world by flood. The symbol of God’s covenant with Noah was the rainbow. That covenant included all mankind, but the subsequent stages of God’s plan narrowed in on a specific people, the Israelites or Hebrews (known to later generations as the Jews), who were God’s ‘chosen people’.2
God subsequently made a covenant with Abraham, the father of the Israelites, in which he promised that he would be their God and they would be his special people, who would worship only him. He would give Abraham’s descendants a promised land, where they could be a nation (Gen. 15-17). The sign of that covenant was the circumcision of every male child. After the covenant with Abraham, the Israelites - descended from Abraham’s grandson Jacob, whom an angel renamed Israel - migrated during a famine into Egypt. There they lived as slaves until God gave them a deliverer named Moses, who led them out of Egypt and into the land of the Canaanites (roughly modern Palestine), which God had promised to them so long ago. Moses received God’s third covenant on Mount Sinai, where he was given the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets by the finger of God himself. The ‘Law of Moses’, which was far more complex, specific and demanding than just the Ten Commandments, filled most of the biblical books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Even after their escape from Egypt, the Jews continued to be persecuted by occupying forces, for example, by the successors of Alexander the Great, and later by the Romans. One of the chief promises of God was that he would raise up a messiah, an ‘anointed one’, to save the Jews. Most Jews today believe that this messiah has not yet come. In the Christian tradition, however, the messiah was born in an eastern province of the Roman Empire, during the reign of Augustus Caesar. This was Jesus.
The life and teachings of Jesus were recorded four times, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospels of Luke (2:1-7) and Matthew (2:1) both claim that Jesus was conceived without a human father, but by supernatural means in the womb of a virgin named Mary, and was born as a human being at Bethlehem. In looking back, Christians have seen many ‘messianic’ texts in the Old Testament, that is, texts that seemed to them to predict the coming of Jesus. In Christian understanding, the coming of Jesus created a new and final covenant between God and all mankind, which replaced the Mosaic covenant with the Jews.
V. The Incarnation
That God’s son became a human being is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to be put into flesh’. The Incarnation occurred through Jesus’s miraculous birth from the Virgin Mary, whom God had specially chosen to become Christ’s mother.
During his life on earth, Jesus taught, performed miracles and gathered disciples in and around Jerusalem. He was betrayed by one of his own followers and arrested by the Jews, who turned him over to their Roman overlords. The Romans executed Jesus by crucifixion. Christians believe that Jesus’s willing suffering and death made up for the sin of his and every human’s ancestor, Adam, and satisfied his heavenly father’s just anger. Jesus’s satisfaction of the penalty for human sin is comprehended in various doctrines of Atonement. For example, Augustine taught that Christ suffered in humanity’s place, and thus freed humanity from death and the devil. This is called the ‘substitution’ or ‘ransom’ theory of atonement: Jesus acted as a substitute for humankind, paying the ranson for our sins. Contrast this with the ‘satisfaction’ theory of atonement, developed by the theologian Anselm of Canterbury. According to Anselm (c. 1033-1109), Adam’s original sin was such a great insult to God that only Jesus, who was both God and man, could be a perfect sacrifice to satisfy it.
Christianity was built on the conviction that Jesus’s death was not the end. On the third day after the crucifixion, God the Father undid the effects of death and brought Jesus back to life, which was his Resurrection, a word meaning ‘to rise up again’. Jesus remained on earth for 40 days in his resurrected state, teaching his followers, especially the 12 apostles. He created his church by commissioning the apostles to make disciples of all nations. They were to baptise their converts in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and were to teach them to obey Jesus’s commands (Matt. 28:19-20). Jesus then rose to heaven, an act called his Ascension, where he was seated at the right hand of his Father.
VI. The nature of the Trinity
God came to be understood as a Trinity of three persons sharing one divine nature, or one God in three persons: Father, Son and Spirit. The most common ritual gesture of Christianity, the sign of the cross, reminds believers constantly of 'the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. But this doctrine did not come into being uncontested. The passage in 1 John 5:7 gives biblical authority to the idea of the Trinity: 'And there are Three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word [Jesus], and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.’ Yet some early Christians questioned the nature of the Trinity based on the nature of Jesus. For example, Paul of Samosata (200-75), Bishop of Antioch, believed that Jesus was born an ordinary man, but became the son of God after his baptism, an idea that was condemned at the Synod of Antioch in 269. Arius (c.250-336), a priest in Alexandria, offered the most prominent counter to the doctrine of the Trinity. He taught that God the Father had come before God the Son, and that the Son was therefore created, and hence of lesser divinity than the Father. This may seem like so much theological nitpicking, but for Jesus to be central to the story of salvation, he would have to be fully God and fully man in one and the same person. In 325, the Council of Nicaea settled the matter, declaring that Jesus was 'of the same being’ as the Father, and that the complete Godhead was comprised of 'three persons in one being’. Despite this decree, Arianism continued into the seventh century, and was especially popular among the Germanic kingdoms of the early medieval period, as we will see in the following chapters.
VII. Eve and Mary
Christianity gave the world two iconic images of women: Eve and Mary. (See Figure 1.) According to a long-developed tradition, Eve was essentially flawed, perhaps even wicked. In spite of the fact that both Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit, in what became the normative reading of the Genesis story, it was Eve who was cast as the temptress, Eve who instigated the 'Fall’ of humans, and Eve who was responsible for humans being tainted with original sin. Augustine was one of the greatest promoters of this idea, which would have a profound effect on medieval views of women for centuries. For example, in one of his letters, he wrote:
What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman. I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.3
Mary, on the other hand, was the pinnacle of goodness and virtue. By the seventh century, Christians celebrated her conception with a feast day, and as this feast spread it eventually found the word immaculate (from the Latin immacula: without stain) attached to it. The idea of immaculate conception was that Mary had been born free from Eve’s original sin, thus making her worthy to be the virgin mother of Jesus. Readers should not confuse Mary’s immaculate conception - in her mother’s womb, the product of sexual intercourse, yet free from sin - and the virginal conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb through the Holy Spirit. The idea of Mary’s immaculate conception was not without its critics, including Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Thomas Aquinas. If Mary was conceived without sin, it made it look as if she did not need Jesus for redemption. The Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) argued that Mary could be immaculately conceived and still be redeemed by Christ, but that redemption would be special because of Mary’s special role as Christ’s mother. The church did not formally proclaim the doctrine of Immaculate Conception until 1854.
VIII. The Last Judgement
Jesus promised, or threatened, to return unexpectedly to judge the living and the dead. In every generation (of the Middle Ages and even today) people have believed that the return of Jesus, called his 'Second Coming’, would be soon. At that moment, dead bodies would rise and be reunited with their souls. The final chapter of history would then be written, with the just and the unjust receiving what they deserved in a cosmic judgement.
In spite of how frightening this may sound, it reveals one of the lasting attractions of Christianity: that it seeks to explain the universe, that its story is cosmic in scope, embracing the full sweep of prehistory, history and posthistory. It began before time and will end, according to tradition, after time comes to a violent halt. Therefore the future is also a part of the Christian account of history. Christian tradition posited not only where the universe had come from but also where it was headed. The age of grace, which began with Jesus, was not permanent, since it too was a stage in God’s cosmic plan. Time would end, material creation would pass away, and only the spiritual worlds of heaven and hell would remain. Every human being who had ever lived would be judged when Jesus returned to earth on the clouds in majesty. The New Testament had vivid descriptions of the troubled last days that would precede the end of temporal things and the general judgement of all humans.
As this chapter has shown, even those teachings of Christianity that believers might consider basic (unchanging, eternal) did not come into existence all at once. Many of them grew out of interpretations that developed over time, as a direct result of historical contingencies. Let us turn now to those earliest contingencies, to begin to see how the medieval church and its doctrines developed.
Suggested reading
Primary sources
The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, New York, 1985)
The Other Gospels: Non-canonical Gospel Texts, edited by Ron Cameron (Philadelphia, 1982, reprinted 2006)
Modern scholarship
Bamberger, Bernard Jacob, Fallen Angels: Soldiers of Satan’s Realm (Philadelphia, 2006) Bauckham, Richard, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge, 1993)
Collins, Adela Yarbro, Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism (Leiden, 2000)
McDannell, Colleen and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History, 2nd edition (New Haven, 2001)
Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (New York, 1989)
Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, 2009)
Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Lucifer, The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York, 1984) Torrance, Thomas F., Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, Illinois, 2008)
Notes
- Throughout this book, we will use masculine pronouns to refer to God. Aware of present day discussions regarding inclusive language, I have decided to retain Lynch’s use of ‘he’, ‘his’, and ‘him’, as divine referents, not the least because this was likely the practice of most medieval people. Find
- The Old Testament refers to God’s chosen people as ‘Israelites’ or ‘Hebrews’. In the New Testament, they are called ‘Judeans’ - after their geographical locale and after the Hebrew/ Aramic word Yehudim. This was likely the term favoured by non-Jews in the first century. ‘Jew’ is a Middle English rendition of the French version of ‘Judean’. Find
- Augustine, Epistle 243.10, in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, A Biography, Revised Edition with a New Epilogue (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), p. 52. Find
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