By Alejandro Garcia-Rivera and Thomas Scirghi, Rowman Littlefield, 200 pages.
This dense, sophisticated theological read covers many current and twentieth-century areas related to liturgical practice and theory. The authors adopt the concept of “ressourcement,” an approach developed by twentieth-century French theologians that heavily influenced Vatican II.
The authors also look to the more recent past and current academic outlooks by examining postmodern thought, which leads them to discuss some philosophical basics of the Church:
“[Jean-Luc] Marion feels that the very nature of God has been compromised by theologies, such as Thomism, that see God as ipsum esse, or Being itself. God cannot be conceptualized, Marion insists, and any attempt to do so is idolatrous. Thus, God cannot be conceived in terms of Being. God is beyond such conception. God is God without being.”
This sort of book represents the kind of theology that will influence the Church's present and future leaders because it deals not only with atheistic materialism, but with the philosophical underpinnings of this ideology and with how Catholic thinkers can respond.
Unfortunately, the average Catholic reader will not have the education or training to understand reflections like the following:
“If in modernity, the issue was whether the invisible made visible was an illusion of superstitious premodern thought, then, in postmodernity, the issue is whether the visible is truly the invisible it purports to be. It is this issue that liturgy must take up if it is to render divine Mystery.”
A rewarding read, but best left to the professors.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Catholic and Ecumenical: History and Hope: Why the Catholic Church is Ecumenical and What She is Doing About It
By Frederick M. Bliss, 185 pages, Rowman Littlefield.
“It is important to take from the scriptural and patristic evidence that diversity is not an end in itself, nor are all forms of diversification good and valid....[T]here is such a thing as illegitimate diversity.”
Catholic and Ecumenical calls for a mature ecumenism by avoiding easy answers. Bliss builds his case for real progress in Church unity through his historical perspective.
He begins by examining ancient Christian wisdom. How united was the religion in its first few centuries. Who were the troublemakers and who were the peacemakers and bridge builders? As usual, political leaders meddled in the Churches, though Christian leaders returned the favor.
The author believes that the Church fathers offer much wisdom for our own theologically-fractured times. For example, St. Augustine preferred to take a pastoral approach rather than a heavy-handed one over the disputed membership of those who had joined one heretical group known as the Donatists.
Bliss also deals frankly with the division between East and West Christians. Many people explain this division from the clause added in the eleventh century by Pope Benedict VIII to the Nicene Creed. The clause teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” whereas the Eastern churches never changed their version, which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. Bliss rightfully points out that the West had been using this newer version for hundreds of years before a pope finally made this practice official.
Yet some other divisions are more black and white. Bliss describes the disastrous fourth crusade in 1204:
After the crusaders were talked into joining the imperial ambitions of “an Alexius,” Constantinople “was sacked, the churches plundered, and Alexius made his way onto the throne. Soon murdered, he was replaced by a westerner, Baldwin of Flanders. Inevitably, a Latin patriarchate was set up and a heavy latinization program got under way. Western canon law, scholastic philosophy, and Roman rituals invaded the east, with a twofold negative effect: deep hurt to easterners and a denial of the experience of legitimate diversity to westerners.”
The strength of Catholic and Ecumenical rests on the fact that the author's strong statements and judgments about the Catholic Church and other ecumenical players do not sound bigoted or insensitive.
The fifth chapter, “Reform to Reformation,” quickly overviews the history and doctrine of the Protestant Reformation, and discusses later-developing churches like the Seventh Day Adventists and the Pentecostals.
Again, Bliss doesn't mince his words about the tensions between Pentecostals and Catholics, largely due to Pentecostal poaching of Catholics. This writing helps the reader understand why ecumenical progress in this case means “to promote mutual understanding and respect through acquaintance with each other's spiritualities and practices.”
Catholic and Ecumenical ends with a listing and short discussion of the various inter-church committees, rather than with a grand vision of Christian reconciliation and harmony, again reflecting Bliss' belief that ecumenism is a long, demanding journey.
“It is important to take from the scriptural and patristic evidence that diversity is not an end in itself, nor are all forms of diversification good and valid....[T]here is such a thing as illegitimate diversity.”
Catholic and Ecumenical calls for a mature ecumenism by avoiding easy answers. Bliss builds his case for real progress in Church unity through his historical perspective.
He begins by examining ancient Christian wisdom. How united was the religion in its first few centuries. Who were the troublemakers and who were the peacemakers and bridge builders? As usual, political leaders meddled in the Churches, though Christian leaders returned the favor.
The author believes that the Church fathers offer much wisdom for our own theologically-fractured times. For example, St. Augustine preferred to take a pastoral approach rather than a heavy-handed one over the disputed membership of those who had joined one heretical group known as the Donatists.
Bliss also deals frankly with the division between East and West Christians. Many people explain this division from the clause added in the eleventh century by Pope Benedict VIII to the Nicene Creed. The clause teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” whereas the Eastern churches never changed their version, which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. Bliss rightfully points out that the West had been using this newer version for hundreds of years before a pope finally made this practice official.
Yet some other divisions are more black and white. Bliss describes the disastrous fourth crusade in 1204:
After the crusaders were talked into joining the imperial ambitions of “an Alexius,” Constantinople “was sacked, the churches plundered, and Alexius made his way onto the throne. Soon murdered, he was replaced by a westerner, Baldwin of Flanders. Inevitably, a Latin patriarchate was set up and a heavy latinization program got under way. Western canon law, scholastic philosophy, and Roman rituals invaded the east, with a twofold negative effect: deep hurt to easterners and a denial of the experience of legitimate diversity to westerners.”
The strength of Catholic and Ecumenical rests on the fact that the author's strong statements and judgments about the Catholic Church and other ecumenical players do not sound bigoted or insensitive.
The fifth chapter, “Reform to Reformation,” quickly overviews the history and doctrine of the Protestant Reformation, and discusses later-developing churches like the Seventh Day Adventists and the Pentecostals.
Again, Bliss doesn't mince his words about the tensions between Pentecostals and Catholics, largely due to Pentecostal poaching of Catholics. This writing helps the reader understand why ecumenical progress in this case means “to promote mutual understanding and respect through acquaintance with each other's spiritualities and practices.”
Catholic and Ecumenical ends with a listing and short discussion of the various inter-church committees, rather than with a grand vision of Christian reconciliation and harmony, again reflecting Bliss' belief that ecumenism is a long, demanding journey.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Illusion or Opportunity: Civil Society and the Quest for Social Change
By Henry Veltmeyer, 136 pages, Fernwood Publishing, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-55266-230-4.
“The only way forward for the working classes and the popular movement is political power: to abandon the development project and engage the class struggle – to directly confront the holders of this power.”
Though Henry Veltmeyer confronts and questions the various capitalist and anti-capitalist policies available to poor people in the developing world, his above words from Illusion or Opportunity's conclusion reflect that economic and social analysis on the left hasn't changed in its core from decades ago, even with the extreme changes that capitalism has brought about all over the world.
This demanding book doesn't come to this conclusion easily, but shows in various ways how the new, post-Soviet capitalism is really is old capitalism. Globalization, begun in the 1970s by America with the goal of spreading influence, has left no capitalist stone unturned, as international corporations mine the world's natural and human ecologies, seeking only increased production and profits.
Simply out, then, Veltmeyer denounces American and Western capitalism, which has been an economic capitalism. “Development,” the precursor to globalization from the 1950s-70s, aimed to bring countries under American influence and away from the Soviet Union.
Globalization has been a more aggressive version of development, but the underlying aim remains to bring countries under American domination. Veltmeyer particularly strikes out at non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which help America implement its policies with a nicer face. “Aid,” he concludes, “more likely serves the interests of the donor country.”
Illusion and Opportunity also examines the cruder aspects of the neo-liberal world economy, such as rampant speculation, “asset denationalization,” “labor exploitation and unfair trade.” His statistics about the deep relative fall of wages for laborers and the rise in poverty rates in most developing countries is shocking. Once China is taken out of the equation, in 2001 we had 600 million more people living on less than $2 per day than in 1981. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figures from 1981-2001 are 288 million people in these straits to 516 million.
These statistics reflect neo-liberalism's “destruction of their class organizations and in a generalized weakening of their capacity to negotiate collective agreements with capital.” Also, the nature of poverty has changed, with more urban poor now than before, when the poor were located in villages. Urban poor represent a greater challenge to social stability. For one thing, they have fewer family ties.
The statistics show that although in percentage terms world poverty and extreme poverty may not be worse, neo-liberalism has failed in its promise to grow populations out of dire poverty. The wealth that neo-liberalism has generated has gone almost entirely to the wealthy classes, as Veltmeyer's following words reflect:
“A one percent tax on the speculative unproductive transactions in the world's capital markets, would be more than enough to pay for basic and adequate health care, food, clean water, and safe sewers for every person on earth.”
Just as importantly, Veltmeyer shows how those countries such as Chile that didn't follow the neo-liberal agenda have had greater success. It didn't allow the same freedom of market capital “inflows” and “outflows,” which has led to increased stability and “an expansion of its social investment policy.”
Neo-liberals shout about freedom, by which they really mean their own freedom to move gigantic amounts of money around the globe in the blink of an eye. Veltmeyer reminds us of the winners and losers of this “freedom”:
“But how many of the world's poor – over 2.5 billion who cannot meet their basic needs – are free to choose, free to make decisions that might improve the quality of their lives, free from exploitation and oppression, free from the operations of capital freed from all constraints and 'interference'?”
“The only way forward for the working classes and the popular movement is political power: to abandon the development project and engage the class struggle – to directly confront the holders of this power.”
Though Henry Veltmeyer confronts and questions the various capitalist and anti-capitalist policies available to poor people in the developing world, his above words from Illusion or Opportunity's conclusion reflect that economic and social analysis on the left hasn't changed in its core from decades ago, even with the extreme changes that capitalism has brought about all over the world.
This demanding book doesn't come to this conclusion easily, but shows in various ways how the new, post-Soviet capitalism is really is old capitalism. Globalization, begun in the 1970s by America with the goal of spreading influence, has left no capitalist stone unturned, as international corporations mine the world's natural and human ecologies, seeking only increased production and profits.
Simply out, then, Veltmeyer denounces American and Western capitalism, which has been an economic capitalism. “Development,” the precursor to globalization from the 1950s-70s, aimed to bring countries under American influence and away from the Soviet Union.
Globalization has been a more aggressive version of development, but the underlying aim remains to bring countries under American domination. Veltmeyer particularly strikes out at non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which help America implement its policies with a nicer face. “Aid,” he concludes, “more likely serves the interests of the donor country.”
Illusion and Opportunity also examines the cruder aspects of the neo-liberal world economy, such as rampant speculation, “asset denationalization,” “labor exploitation and unfair trade.” His statistics about the deep relative fall of wages for laborers and the rise in poverty rates in most developing countries is shocking. Once China is taken out of the equation, in 2001 we had 600 million more people living on less than $2 per day than in 1981. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figures from 1981-2001 are 288 million people in these straits to 516 million.
These statistics reflect neo-liberalism's “destruction of their class organizations and in a generalized weakening of their capacity to negotiate collective agreements with capital.” Also, the nature of poverty has changed, with more urban poor now than before, when the poor were located in villages. Urban poor represent a greater challenge to social stability. For one thing, they have fewer family ties.
The statistics show that although in percentage terms world poverty and extreme poverty may not be worse, neo-liberalism has failed in its promise to grow populations out of dire poverty. The wealth that neo-liberalism has generated has gone almost entirely to the wealthy classes, as Veltmeyer's following words reflect:
“A one percent tax on the speculative unproductive transactions in the world's capital markets, would be more than enough to pay for basic and adequate health care, food, clean water, and safe sewers for every person on earth.”
Just as importantly, Veltmeyer shows how those countries such as Chile that didn't follow the neo-liberal agenda have had greater success. It didn't allow the same freedom of market capital “inflows” and “outflows,” which has led to increased stability and “an expansion of its social investment policy.”
Neo-liberals shout about freedom, by which they really mean their own freedom to move gigantic amounts of money around the globe in the blink of an eye. Veltmeyer reminds us of the winners and losers of this “freedom”:
“But how many of the world's poor – over 2.5 billion who cannot meet their basic needs – are free to choose, free to make decisions that might improve the quality of their lives, free from exploitation and oppression, free from the operations of capital freed from all constraints and 'interference'?”
Monday, June 22, 2009
Meet the Rabbis: Rabbinic Thought and the Teachings of Jesus
By Brad H. Young, 265 pages, $16.95, Hendrickson.
Meet the Rabbis does more than show the Jewish roots of the gospels. The book claims that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were all that remained of the varied and rich ancient Jewish religious culture after the Romans had battered the Jewish community in 70 AD (when the Romans destroyed the Temple) and 135 AD when the Romans kicked the Jews out of their land).
Young shows how the gospels have many parallels in the teachings of the pharisees, who were the precursors to the rabbis. Even centuries after the ministry of Jesus, the writings of Jewish rabbis continued to share much with what Jesus taught.
The author points out the deep Jewishness of the Sermon on the Mount: “What is the ultimate concern of these Jewish teachings and the Sermon on the Mount? They both seek to interpret biblical revelation and apply it in practical ways. There is a theological connection.” Both seek right relationship between the individual and God, and between rightly-believing individuals.
When placed side by side with writings from rabbinic literature, gospel texts show the Jewishness of Jesus' teaching. Jesus and the pharisees / rabbis were concerned with spiritual poverty, good works, the real understanding of Torah, anger and murder, sexuality, and forgiveness.
One part of the great division between Christians and Jews arises from a Christian misreading of the gospel where Jesus sharply criticizes the pharisees. Gospel readers have long forgotten that this represented an inner-Jewish argument.
Making matters worse, the Christian tradition has, according to Young, greatly misunderstood the pharisees' role in the crucifixion of Jesus. “New Testament scholars,” Young notes, “have been slow to recognize how the Pharisees at times supported the community of believers against the persecution of the Sadducees.”
Moreover, Christians fail to realize just how typically Jewish Jesus was, as exemplified by his master-student relationship with his disciples, something that was commonplace between pharisees and their students. Young explains that this master-disciple relationship was the core of the Jewish tradition, the thing that made the tradition come alive and guarantee its passage from one generation to another.
Because of the close parallels between Judaism and Jesus' teachings, Young spends a great deal of time discussing rabbinic writings such as the Mishnah, which is the “tradition of oral teachings.” It is largely a rabbinic commentary on the Bible, including “a specific canon or collection of legal opinions compiled under the direction of Rabbi Judah HaNasi.”
Through his discussion on Jesus' teachings and on such writings as the Mishnah, Young calls Christians to understand that the Jewish “law” does not mean law in our understanding. Torah refers to God's revelation, including the right way to live when confronted with this revelation. Christianity doesn't negate Judaism.
In addition, Young argues that Jesus did not come to replace the law but to fulfill it. Believers come to Jesus, in other words, through a full understanding of the Hebrew writings – the Old Testament – rather than through forgetting about Jesus' Jewishness.
Meet the Rabbis does more than show the Jewish roots of the gospels. The book claims that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were all that remained of the varied and rich ancient Jewish religious culture after the Romans had battered the Jewish community in 70 AD (when the Romans destroyed the Temple) and 135 AD when the Romans kicked the Jews out of their land).
Young shows how the gospels have many parallels in the teachings of the pharisees, who were the precursors to the rabbis. Even centuries after the ministry of Jesus, the writings of Jewish rabbis continued to share much with what Jesus taught.
The author points out the deep Jewishness of the Sermon on the Mount: “What is the ultimate concern of these Jewish teachings and the Sermon on the Mount? They both seek to interpret biblical revelation and apply it in practical ways. There is a theological connection.” Both seek right relationship between the individual and God, and between rightly-believing individuals.
When placed side by side with writings from rabbinic literature, gospel texts show the Jewishness of Jesus' teaching. Jesus and the pharisees / rabbis were concerned with spiritual poverty, good works, the real understanding of Torah, anger and murder, sexuality, and forgiveness.
One part of the great division between Christians and Jews arises from a Christian misreading of the gospel where Jesus sharply criticizes the pharisees. Gospel readers have long forgotten that this represented an inner-Jewish argument.
Making matters worse, the Christian tradition has, according to Young, greatly misunderstood the pharisees' role in the crucifixion of Jesus. “New Testament scholars,” Young notes, “have been slow to recognize how the Pharisees at times supported the community of believers against the persecution of the Sadducees.”
Moreover, Christians fail to realize just how typically Jewish Jesus was, as exemplified by his master-student relationship with his disciples, something that was commonplace between pharisees and their students. Young explains that this master-disciple relationship was the core of the Jewish tradition, the thing that made the tradition come alive and guarantee its passage from one generation to another.
Because of the close parallels between Judaism and Jesus' teachings, Young spends a great deal of time discussing rabbinic writings such as the Mishnah, which is the “tradition of oral teachings.” It is largely a rabbinic commentary on the Bible, including “a specific canon or collection of legal opinions compiled under the direction of Rabbi Judah HaNasi.”
Through his discussion on Jesus' teachings and on such writings as the Mishnah, Young calls Christians to understand that the Jewish “law” does not mean law in our understanding. Torah refers to God's revelation, including the right way to live when confronted with this revelation. Christianity doesn't negate Judaism.
In addition, Young argues that Jesus did not come to replace the law but to fulfill it. Believers come to Jesus, in other words, through a full understanding of the Hebrew writings – the Old Testament – rather than through forgetting about Jesus' Jewishness.
Christendom
By Brian Welter
Christendom was created and sustained by the papacy, and when the corruption of the papal court had become too entrenched through the centuries, Christendom broke up. Papal leadership made and sustained Christendom. Yet rather than total domination from Rome, this was done with great variety and diversity of outlook. Rather than faithfully following the papacy in every little detail, it was the shared broad vision of this world that Christendom took from the papacy. This happened even when the papacy or pope himself was unpopular.
1) Social and Cultural Generalities; Popular Belief; Saints
1.1 Medieval images of Christ
Christ as warrior: Christ descending to hell on Holy Saturday (Dante Hell Canto 4); Christ fighting the devil and paying a ransom (Anselm; Aquinas); Christ who fights evil; what kind of grace does this lead to? Masculine God of grace or feminized God of sentimental love?
Feminizing images of Christendom (being married to Christ; images of Christ as a nurturing mother); Bernard of Clairvaux; Hedewijch and the female mystics; feminized, sentimental love
Mary: Her increasing place after 1000 as intercessor – God is close to the individual concerns; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux; Mechtild of Magdeburg (Mary as goddess)
Augustine's Christology and soteriology; Platonism and neo-Platonism in Aug: and influences on popular belief
Bonaventure: “there is no separation between theology and mysticism in Albert [the Great] any more than in Bonaventure.”1 ; Bonaventure's mysticism i.e. Knowing Christ personally; Bonaventure's Platonism
1.2 Church Control
Church controlled marriage (Bede): As the Church gained more and more conversions, it was able to control family life. This gave Christianity power over people's most intimate lives, and also allowed for the Church to control the upbringing of children. Increased Church control of marriage resulted in infant baptisms becoming the norm, as Christian families were formed. Paganism was increasingly marginalized, as pagans could no longer turn to their families for support when the Church was changing other aspects of society.
“this identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature that distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history” - the Church was of the world, “appearing as a state alongside other states, with its own law courts, tax system, and bureaucracy.”(Foley 186-7)
The Church controlled the economy: was the final arbiter on which occupations were sinful and which were not – the Church's blessing of a profession meant that that profession could expand and take off; it had more prestige; medieval corporations under the tutelage of the Church, including have an official patron saint and religious duties, symbolized by the corporation's sponsorship of a window in a church (Le Goff); Usury a sin (Dante, Hell Canto 11)
1.3 Medieval Christian Imagination
“Sans avoir de centre dominant (Rome qui aurait pu et dû l'être était trop excentrique; Jérusalem fût, même au temps des croisades et du royaume latin de Terre sainte, un centre surtout symbolique; et l'Empire, après l'éphémère installation de Charlemagne à Aix-la-Chapelle, n'eut pas de capitale), la Chrétienté se constitua un territoire central.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 16) ; Le Goff: the peripheral areas were important, especially for evangelization: This was so because (I'm talking here) the papacy had given this vision for Christendom to follow.
“Une des étranges caractéristiques de l'espace de l'Occident médiéval est d'avoir eu des centres idéologiques périphériques ou externes.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36) -> Because its spiritual centre was external to it, Christendom became more and more open to new or strange ideas, including the gradual re-introduction of Aristotle into its philosophy. One of the results of the tragedy of the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 was the import into Italy and therefore the West of Greek art and books, for which Christendom hungered. It acknowledged its backwardness and its dependence on other areas for its spiritual and intellectual roots and growth.
12th C.: “la nostalgie de cette centralité [Rome] perdue mais conservée dans l'imaginaire.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36) Thus, even when Rome, that is, the papacy, didn't function well or was corrupt, the ideology of the papacy and Roman leadership carried it for decades, if not centuries. Christendom's centre was a spiritual rather than physical location; Christendom, which eventually grew into the modern West that continues this tradition, was more about an idea than it was about something physical. They weren't building a material civilization, but a spiritual one.
The medieval imagination, while demanding concrete manifestations of God through miracles and other works, also had a great capacity for the beyond, the non-physical. The medieval imagination was an imagination of absence as well as presence, where heaven or Jerusalem became the Platonic ideals for this world. With no internal centre, Christendom looked to a spiritual centre, whose physical location was Jerusalem and whose real, spiritual location was heaven. This life was therefore ephemeral, a journey, to something much more substantial.
2) The Bible
The Bible was the greatest source of the medieval imagination.
2.1 Bible as Reference
The Bible and life in reference to it; King Ethelfrith is compared to Saul (Bede)
The centrality of Jerusalem as the city of God reflects the love for the Bible, as Bonaventure's following words show not only the medieval love for the biblical Jerusalem, but for the reign of God's peace that medieval Christians believed it had known in history: “ Rogate quae ad pacem sunt Ierusalem. Sciebat enim, quod thronus Salomonis non erat nisi in pace, cum scriptum sit: In pace factus est locus eius, et habitatio eius in Sion.”2
Love of the Bible (Bede)
2.2 The Vulgate
Helps to centralize the Church under Rome and to ensure that all of Christendom is Latin – makes Latin the unifying language of Christendom; one of the most important commonalities; the Vulgate Bible was the primary reference point for Christendom and the creation of the medieval imagination, as it provided for the common language
In the exclusive hands of the clergy, helped promote the clerical-lay division of Christendom i.e. The clerical nature of Christendom (the clerics were the protectors and promoters of Christendom, as well as among the chief beneficiaries). Christendom was in the hands of the clergy, and the laity were outside of much of what it offered and stood for.
2.3 Illuminated Manuscripts; the Bible and Art (Cathedral Sculpture)
2.4 Eschatology and the Book of Revelation
Eschatological sense to the Middle Ages (Bede): Medieval Christians waited for the coming of Christ. They were a Pentecostal people; signs of the end were everywhere; they dealt with natural or social disasters, as well as war, as signs from heaven that the end was near, and that these events had great, cosmic meaning; Christendom was caught up in the centre of a great cosmic drama; medieval mystery plays
Augustinian eschatology -> Bonaventure's eschatology (Franciscan eschatology)
Joachim of Fiore: his “prophetic books” were “a powerful criticism of the clergy and its corruption, and point, as divine remedy, to a providential cleansing and a destruction of institutional Christianity, to be replaced by the 'Eternal Gospel' of the Holy Ghost. Joachim foretold a new age of 'love and freedom' as opposed to authority and despotism. The Church was, in the new age of the Holy Spirit, to be ruled by contemplatives, and by the Holy Spirit through them.”3 ; Joachim's use of the Bible
Dante
(Read http://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/20/Religiologiques20PDF/20(087-111)Boglioni.pdf) (http://www.colbud.hu/main_old/PubArchive/PL/PL20-Vauchez.pdf)
Various prophets of the apocalypse (Hildegard of Bingen (?))
3) Saints
3.1 Early Medieval Saints and Bishops and their Unique Teaching Office
Early medieval saints and bishops: Power over nature; connection between the physical world and the spiritual-Christian world (Bede)
Miracles: Sight to the blind (Bede): Christianity replaced paganism as the way to improve one's lot in this world as well. Believers' lives improved in the here and now; i.e. The material benefits of Christianity, and how it reorganized society
A miracle solved the issue (Bede): Miracles were also sources of power for saints and for the Church. Through miracles people believed. God became tangible through miracles. In this sense, as with the sacraments, the idea of Christendom, which had God at the apex, was made concrete and physical for all to see. Medieval folk looked for signs of God's existence everywhere. Even the great doctors of the Church, such as Thomas Aquinas, looked for signs through analogy.
Relics and totemism (Bede): Relics, as with miracle-producing preachers and saints, were conduits of the divine. People expected them to produce miracles, and used them as a focus for their prayers. Instead of going to the doctor or a hospital, people placed their hopes for cures in relics. Relics were therefore a source of great hope and joy, and were central to medieval Christendom. In a way, they had a eucharistic or sacramental function. As the Church moved peasant Christians further and further away from the Eucharist, the people practiced popular devotions.
Power of God shown everywhere; always looking for signs, since there was division between faith/God and nature; nature was a second revelation (Bede) God's power was real in this world, and was not, at least in the early Middle Ages, seen in psychological terms. The inner disposition of the person was not as important as the outward signs. An analogy between the created world and the reality of God was taken for granted.
3.2 Ideals of Conversion and Sainthood
The ideal behavior of a saint and saintly conversion, which included tears; prophecy of the saint; visions; messages from heaven; oracles (Bede): Conversion bestowed on a person the power of the Holy Spirit. In the saints, this power manifested itself in a particularly strong, visible way, through spiritual and physical power. These signs were a requirement for being a saint. Sainthood was not a psychological category, but a category of power, especially healing power.
3.3 Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's Confessions as the paradigm of personal reflection and psychology of faith, struggle, and ultimate conversion
Historiography (City of God): how did Christendom see its earthly vocation; Christendom had a vocation and was about more than power – more than about accumulating and spending power; its had meaning in history, as it made up the new Israel – it continued not only Rome but Jerusalem as well, thus answering Tertullian's question, What do Rome and Jerusalem have in common?
Merton p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “The Augustinian theology, inseparable from the drama of Augustine's own conversion and of his whole life, comes to give all the spirituality of the West a special character of its own.” ... “this overwhelming influence of Augustine.” especially in the Cistercians, the Franciscans (esp after Bonaventure)
Augustinian anthropology and epistemology underscored much of Christendom. Platonism. Manicheism.
“The personality of Augustine and his Mysticism: the drama and conflict of Augustine not only profoundly and definitively shaped his own spirituality, but through him reached down to most of the medieval mystics of the Christian West.”4 (Merton still, p. 158): “His mysticism is highly reflexive and subjective. All that is said about subjective piety in the West, all the attempts to lay the blame on this or that later mystic, remind us to look to Augustine as to the real source.... His 'subjectivity' is obviously quite compatible with a deep sacramental and liturgical piety and above all with a profound sense of the Church.” ; (p.158): “His mysticism is therefore closely bound up with psychological observation, especially reflection on the workings of mystical experience, its roots, etc.”: “This psychology reaches into his anthropology itself, with the Trinitarian structure of the image of God in man. This is found everywhere in the West after Augustine.”
Also Aug's dramatic interior struggle with evil influences the West after him (Merton 158) (MORE from MERTON)
3.4 Saint Francis of Assisi as the Second Christ
Francis seemed to usher in a new epoch, as testified by the beliefs of Joachim di Fiore and Bonaventure. Francis as the second Christ. (“...et dedit dominus noster Christus; cuius praedicationis repetitor fuit pater noster Franciscus, in omni sua praedicatione pacem in principio et in fine annuntians, in omni salutatione pacem optans, in omni contemplatione ad exstaticam pacem suspirans, tanquam civis illius Ierusalem, de qua dicit vir ille pacis, qui cum his qui oderunt pacem, erat pacificus: Rogate quae ad pacem sunt Ierusalem.”5 For Bonaventure, Francis' sainthood includes participating in Christendom's vision of Jerusalem as the city of the savior and a spiritual city of God. Francis is the saint of peace, rather than a Christian warrior who crusades or fights in Spain. Francis helps popularize the inwards sense of spiritual struggle, where the penitential movement didn't fight the Saracens but went inward and individual. Christendom had peacemaking saints, as the Church worked to construct peace within Christendom; it was not acceptable for Christians to fight against one another.
Francis' response to clerical corruption, heretics (Waldensians), and the new bourgeois money economy. “The Franciscan movement is especially tied up with the Joachimite prophecies, and when the crisis of the order ensued, the Spiritual Franciscans looked back to Joachim for their inspiration and carried on a bitter struggle”6; Dante: Joachim in Heaven, circle 12
The institutionalization and watering-down of the Franciscan ideal: the split in the order (the Spirituals); St. Bonaventure and his spirituality and leadership of the Franciscans. The energy of the Franciscans led to a new evangelization of the urban areas. The friars bring contemplation to far-flung urban areas throughout Europe, whereas the monastics had been rural fixtures
The friars at the University of Paris: this went against the spirit of Francis, who believed in a simple, humble, almost anti-intellectual spirituality, a philosophy of Christ rather than one of the universities. Yet because these friars, along with the Dominicans, were at the forefront of the new evangelization, they found themselves at the forefront of the new, urban education and theology, which, while in continuity with the Cathedral schools, were a break from the monastic theology and learning which had previously dominated. Learning in Christendom became urban, separated from liturgy and spirituality, and eventually sponsored the division of philosophy from theology. Christendom gained much from the renewal group, the Franciscans, but needed to tame it, something it had failed to do with the Cathars and Waldensians.
Francis brought mysticism out of the monasteries and into the world.7
4) Spirituality and Theology 1: Sin and Damnation
4.1 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life
As stated above, much of this is rooted in Aug's psychological turmoil and psychological reading of the virtues / the good and sin / evil. Manicheism.
Theology begins to speak more and more to the inner lives of people rather than to the outer, legalistic and behavioral aspects; the sacraments are only one aspect of this, since most people do not have regular access to these; those who do have regular access are also turning inwards; individualization of spirituality - the sinner is alone before God and he/she rather than the community answers for sin; structural or communal sin is not a priority; Dante's hell is primarily a place of the individual; communities are not damned; individuals are, so there is a pre-eminence of the individual soul and a basic equality of humans even with the great hierarchical society of the MA
Avarice, which even touches the Church and its cardinal and other clerics (Dante, Hell 7)
Psychology of anger (Dante Hell 7; 9)
Despair, sin; virtue (Dante)
Pride: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante's psychological and sociological analysis of sin (Dante Hell 11) reflects the increasingly individualistic side of Christianity. Christendom allowed at this point for the development of the individual.
The psychology behind the sin of fraud (Dante Hell 11)
Deepening self-analysis / self-psychology and sense of one's own thoughts (Dante Hell 13)
4.2 Hell and Damnation
Church teaching: People scared of hell; the church policy was to deliberately scare people; belief in original sin; heavy guilt, which even virtues don't get rid of (Bede)
Augustine's Original Sin; sexuality (Confessions)
Medieval mystery plays – the devil and his trickery, and the gullibility of Christians, who are ensnared by him
Final judgement (Dante Hell 6); can't escape who your were while on earth when you die (Dante Hell 14) A direct, immediate line between one's earthly actions and eternity in hell exists in Christendom. Morality was about keeping yourself out of hell primarily, and only in selected writings and people was morality and spirituality about coming to know God. Building the kingdom of God on earth was not the job of Christians, but saving themselves and others from punishment.
God's justice is fearful: the damned cannot escape their unrepented sins (Dante Hell 12); the vengeance of God, and punishment of hell comes from God (Dante Hell Canto 14) Fear of hell and of God's justice permeated the world in which medieval Christians lived. Decisions and actions carried out in this world had eternal meaning and significance. Christendom was an otherworldly ideology that didn't see itself building anything permanent now. It operated under a sense of waiting and expectation for better things to come, if only people could behave. Because sin and punishment were individual, the Church and Christendom had a growing preoccupation with the individual. The salvation of a soul depended more on the individual than on the society. Society served the individual in that it served to educate and support the individual and his soul on the hopeful journey to salvation. The individual did not exist to serve the society in a salvatory sense. Thus Dante meets and talks with individual souls in hell. While some of these were certainly part of a greater movement and may have been heavily influenced by someone else, in the end the individual soul had to pay the price; the commune didn't exist in hell. Dante imagines no society in hell, under which the individual soul is subsumed. At no point to individuals melt away into the collective, and on the Day of Judgment this won't happen either.
The sense that life is short and eternal life is long (Dante Hell 12); the need for repentance (Purgatorio 3 (i think)
4.3 Defilement of the Natural World
Spirituality: The defilement of the secular world, and the love for the contemplative life, even by those (clerics) who serve secular church or government interests (Bede); Pope Gregory the Great would have loved to remain a monk rather than serve as pope, which was a burden
5) Spirituality and Theology 2: The Church's Teachings
5.1 The Monastic Life
The high esteem for monks and the monastic life; the rejection of worldly living for monastic spirituality i.e. The superiority of monastic spirituality over lay spirituality (Bede): “the sole hope of salvation, of remission of an individual's sins, lay with the prayers of the monks... in this frightened and unstable world.” (Mullins 8)
St. Benedict and his rule; Cluniac reform; the Cistercians: theology, their support for the papacy instead of the local bishop aided the centralization of Christendom under the papacy and prevented any ecclesiastical rivals to the pope from developing in the West: aside from a Council no one could hope to rival the papacy;
Monastic theological and spiritual writings influenced Christendom, including the papacy itself.
The development of Latin church culture i.e. Church culture was not primarily a vernacular culture, though mystery plays and popular devotions developed in parallel to ecclesiastical Latin
The development of book culture and how monasteries were the great publishing houses of Europe, and through this they came to influence the papacy itself, as in Gaul's monasteries' writings on liturgy (Germanization of the Eucharist); spirituality became bookish, about orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy; this book culture meant that Christendom's religion was more and more bookish and university-oriented, and less and less from the people or from the liturgy – the great synthesis and unity of Christendom did not mean that every element in the schema participated fully in the ordering of things; these gaps were to be the undoing of Christendom
Monasteries at the heart of Christendom, including spiritual, theological, but also social and economic: “it was the monasteries that held a vital key in the shaping of a new Europe. They acted as colleges, patrons of art and architecture, moral guardians, benevolent landlords, founders of social services, centers of capital wealth, as well as being institutions of vast political influence on an international scale, with the ear of kings, emperors, and popes.” (Mullins, p. 7)
The Rule of Benedict and the salvatory role of labor” work as penitence – work was bad because it was divine punishment for original sin, but the monks gave labor prestige because they gave penitence and humility prestige (Le Goff); Christendom was a penitential culture, which meant that innovation and creativity only happened in certain areas that served penance or were released from the need for penance (like the theology professor)
How monks drained swamps and built up agriculture i.e. Citeaux the swamp became the source of the Cistercians, who went to the forested fringes of Europe and worked what hitherto had been unworkable land (Cluny, Cistercians)
5.2 The Sacraments: The Eucharist
Germanization of the Eucharist: e.g. “vessels were not only forged of precious metals, they underwent a special rite of blessing or consecration.” (Foley 177) – Christendom synthesized the Germanic spiritual worldview and the Latin theological worldview; the old spirits and practices of the northern peoples were transmuted into Latin Christian practices, including the changing of gods/goddesses into saints and angels
Transubstantiation (Aquinas; 4th Lateran Council); the magic and drama of the Germans; The Blood of Jesus; Eucharistic devotions; the body that suffers ->suffering
Theology of the Eucharist
Increasing division between the clergy and the laity -> the laity are not close to the Eucharist and can't even see it; strict hierarchy (Foley); before the pagans were considered unclean by the church, who now sees Christian lay as unclean, and doesn't completely trust them, especially that they are 100% 'clean' of paganism - the laity are to be kept under control, as they are peasants who are close to nature and therefore to the devil (?); they speak the vernacular rather than the church's language; some of their priests cannot even say Latin mass – a great disruption in Christendom was the lack of integration of the laity, which was a cause of the Reformation and the ultimate end of Christendom – Christendom failed to fully integrate the people; Christendom was not a people's ideology or a “people's program” with the “whole people of God”; Christendom was thus radically inclusive and exclusive at the same time, where this suspicion on the part of the Church signalled that the evangelization of Europe had not been complete
“a sustained emphasis on the unworthiness of the laity.... Unworthy people did not go to communion regularly, and offertory processions were eliminated in many places.” (Foley 167)
Increasing liturgical confusion and innovation: “Popular devotion focused on seeing the host rather than receiving it: (Foley 194); indulgences, Masses for the dead – brought the liturgy into every aspect of people's lives, as they may have had pagan rites for the dead before the Church came
The 8th sacrament: Knighthood (La Chanson de Roland; Percival ou la Quete du Grail; ) - the unity of Christendom, and of how even fighting men had to order their consciences to God's plan
Ordination in Germanic Europe: “multiple rites that invested the priest with new powers, including the ability to move things from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred, and effectively moved him from one realm to the other as well.” (Foley 177); the integration of the Germanic peoples, away from the earlier Arianism
5.3 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life; Mysticism
Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Merton notes after quoting from it: “Here love and prayer are contrasted with study, which is incapable of bringing us to union. Note however that St. Bonaventure certainly stresses the unity of the intellectual and spiritual lives as much as anyone ever did.” (An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.,p. 152) In Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Bonaventure describes his individual spiritual experience as something of importance for the Church and his own teaching, as theology becomes interior, individual, somewhat subjective, and experiential: “ad montem Alvernae tanquam ad locum quietum amore quaerendi pacem spiritus declinarem, ibique existens, dum mente tractarem aliquas mentales ascensiones in Deum, inter alia occurrit illud miraculum, quod in praedicto loco contigit ipso beato Francisco, de visione scilicet Seraph alati ad instar Crucifixi. In cuius consideratione statim visum est mihi, quod visio illa praetenderet ipsius patris suspensionem in contemplando et viam, per quam pervenitur ad eam.”8
This important spiritual experience happened outside of the liturgy and the rites of the Church. Individual subjective experiences by both men and women were having an unprecedented, revolutionary impact on the Church. Catherine of Siena's (I think) mysticism led her to give advice to the pope, which he took seriously. It led Julian of Norwich to become, outside of the clergy-only confessional, a spiritual adviser to members of all strata of her society. This pentecostal, opening up of the spiritual life in Christendom happened at the time of the institutional Church's greatest power and the greatest separation of clergy and lay. It allowed for revolutionary levels of freedom, as the Church slowly lost control to mystics, visionaries, and others from all walks of life who took the personal initiative.
Bonaventure's above words also indicated that the path to God was increasingly seen in mystical, individual light rather than in a corporate, sacramental, ritualistic light. Note how his spiritual searching did not occur during the Mass. The above words also reflect the advanced level of mystical prayer that was occurring at this time, as well as the attempt by Christians as individuals to articulate these experiences. At this time, most of this articulation was within the bounds of orthodox theology. For Bonaventure, love is the key to the spiritual life: “Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi, qui adeo Paulum ad tertium caelum raptum7 transformavit in Christum, ut diceret: Christo confixus sum cruci, iam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus; qui etiam adeo mentem Francisci absorbuit.”9 Bonaventure adds that one can enter this path only through the crucifixion, without mentioning the sacraments, before warning against entering by the wide gate, that is, the gate of hell. Thus the virtues and the vices play an increasing role in salvation.
Bonaventure next acknowledges that the Blood of Christ saves, but he doesn't specify as to whether this is the blood of the historical event of the crucifixion, a once and for all event, or the blood of Christ available to all Christians for all ages through the Eucharist. This lack of precision contrasts with the precise formulations of Aquinas and other scholastics ot only concerning the Eucharist, but all areas of theology. Bonaventure has his own precision in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, but it is the psychological and spiritual precision of the mystic, of one concerned with the subjective spiritual life.
Bonaventure: Knowledge comes from God. Christians receive this knowledge rather than create it or find it. At the beginning of his work Itinerarium Mentis in Deum he notes his and Christendom's debt to God: “In principio primum principium, a quo cunctae illuminationes descendunt tanquam a Patre luminum, a quo est omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum.”10 Illumination comes through revelation because there is a greater knowledge, a knowledge of the perfectly real, which reflects Plato's idea that humans were living in the half-dark, and that the truth, of which we could know only a little, existed in the perfect, fullest sense.
Christendom thus became defined as the place of prayer, with a culture of prayer to go along with the external rites and the militia christi as increasing numbers of mystics and church leaders teach and write about prayer techniques, and as the Church becomes more and more a Church of prayer and not only of rites and credal formulations: “Desideria autem in nobis inflammantur dupliciter, scilicet per clamorem orationis, quae rugire facit a gemitu cordis, et per fulgorem speculationis, qua mens ad radios lucis directissime et intensissime se convertit.”11 Here again, the following words reflect an almost total neglect of the place of the sacraments, including the Eucharist, in the Christian spiritual journey, and many aspects, including the individual, affective, spiritualized components of the following words, could easily find their place in the Protestant Reformation, or later Lutheran Quietist spirituality: “Igitur ad gemitum orationis per Christum crucifixum, per cuius sanguinem purgamur a sordibus vitiorum, primum quidem lectorem invito, ne forte credat quod sibi sufficiat lectio sine unctione, speculatio sine devotione, investigatio sine admiratione, circumspectio sine exsultatione, industria sine pietate, scientia sine caritate, intelligentia sine humilitate, studium absque divina gratia, speculum absque sapientia divinitus inspirata.”12
This kind of mysticism frequently sounds close to Pelagianism in the emphasis on human effort and the minimal discussion of divine grace. The spiritual life and its fruits are not a gift from God, but something that Christians are to reach in their zealousness: “Exerce igitur te, homo Dei, prius ad stimulum conscientiae remordentem, antequam oculos eleves ad radios sapientiae in eius speculis relucentes, ne forte ex ipsa radiorum speculatione in graviorem incidas foveam tenebrarum.”13 Yet a little later in the same work Bonaventure does acknowledge that we cannot lift ourselves up through our own strength, but only through the help of a greater power.
Bonaventure's writings also reflect the increasingly psychological view of the person and Christian spirituality, as Christendom took a turn towards the person and the psychology of the individual: “ Secundum hunc triplicem progressum mens nostra tres habet aspectus principales. Unus est ad corporalia exteriora, secundum quem vocatur animalitas seu sensualitas: alius intra se et in se, secundum quem dicitur spiritus; tertius supra se, secundum quem dicitur mens.”14
Virtue is interpreted psychologically (Dante)
5.4 Purgatory and Suffering
Hope is the purpose of Purgatory (Dante Purgatorio 2); righteous punishment for sins that prepares the Christian to see God (Dante Purgatorio 1,3); homecoming to God (Dante Purgatorio 1)
Christian life as a journey; go deeper, i.e. There are no shortcuts in the spiritual life (Dante Purgatorio 1); Bonaventure and the inward journey
“La forêt devient le desert chrétien avec ses tentations, ses dangers, mais fût aussi le le lieu d'un accès privilégié à Dieu.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Image, p. 41)
5.5 Faith and Reason
The reasonableness of faith (Dante Hell Canto 11); the mystery of the Trinity (Dante Purgatorio 3)
Aquinas and Aristotle -> the need to Christianize Aristotle before he can be accepted within Christendom i.e. Separation of philosophy and theology, but theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, which means that theology wtill has the last word on the limits of philosophy; philosophy without faith: the destiny of the great pagan philosophers (Dante Purgatorio 3): A philosophy without Christian faith cannot save people, and leads to an eternal dissatisfaction.
The scholastics and the University of Paris; Abelard's new teaching style, which was an aggressive, confrontational style that shook theology and gave no comfortable answers, but challenged authority and the tradition instead: philosophy no longer guards tradition and theology, but challenges it and questions everything; it is all right to question things
Abelard versus Bernard of Clairvaux: the separation of theology from liturgy and from prayer/contemplation, as theology becomes a university subject, objectified as something to be studied and analyzed rather than as the life-giving source of the community; theology becomes the domain of experts who fragment theology into its various disciplines
Anselm and the use of philosophy to prove God's existence
The Dominicans (and the University of Paris and the papacy) as guardians of orthodoxy: theology (such as regarding the Eucharist or ecclesiology (Gratian's Decretals)) becomes much more defined and precise; theology becomes a science and moves further and further away from the liturgy and prayer / contemplation (including the monasteries) as its centre becomes the university, with philosophy becoming increasingly independent of theology (unlike Islam?) and an increasing threat to the Summas of the time
The great theological summas as another counter to the heretical – Christendom's attempt to bring everything into a (theological) whole, understandable philosophically
The natural law; and how nature follows the mind of God (Dante Hell Canto 11); Aquinas' analogy from nature; natural law as an example of how philosophy supports
theology; Platonism and Aristotelian roots -> synthesis of Greek reason and Hebrew transcendence i.e. Christendom / the Middle Ages was the time of synthesis as well as summa, where everything was to be ordered and united – a unitary view of the world, where everyone and everything, including knowledge, has its ordered place – is not a revolutionary or reforming (semper reformanda) mindset or theology; theologians and the Church magisterium aim to preserve rather than to find the new and the creative; creativity was the creativity of expressing this unity, as in the creativity of the summas
“scholastic theology was becoming more and more a speculative science and less and less a wisdom, even though the great theologians kept stressing the sapiential aspect of it.” ... “with the great love for scholastic thought there was developed a kind of contempt for patristic and strictly religious wisdom, and for contemplation as such.” (152 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.)s
5.6 Late Medieval Lay Piety
Tauler, Eckhart, the Beguines, Hadewijch; the Brethren of the Common Life; the Theologia Mystica; the Rhineland Mystics: 14th C. msytics: “under the influence of the school of Cologne etc. where Albert the Great taught, were strongly Dominican and Dionysian, with an intellectual stress, even a speculative character, that prevented their Dionysian trend from becoming exclusively affective and anti-intellectual. Normally, we find that the mystics of darkness of the Rhenish and English schools are strongly Thomistic.” (p. 153 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism); The Cloud of Unknowing (Dionysian according to Merton); Merton: 155: “The Dominicans begin to break away from the dominance of Augustine and it is in the Rhenish mystics, largely under Dominican infuence or actually Dominicans themselves, that we see Dionysius preponderant over Augustine.”
(p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “Bridal mysticism {is} affective, cataphatic, erotic, a mysticism of desire and espousal, {with} a stress on the faculties of the soul, especially the will; {it is} generally Augustinian {and} tends to be anti-intellectual.”
Increasing individualism (Le Goff); Merton 174 An Introduction to Christian Mysticism
Pilgrimage: The Book of Margery Kemp, and how she was harassed, accused of Lollardry by the bishops as she went on her pilgrimage
The virtues: Humility: bishops discussing whether to follow Aug's tradition, will only if he shows he is humble (Bede)
6) Ecclesiastical Affairs
6.1 The role of the papacy
Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries (and encouraged them when they wanted to give up), including Augustine, to Britain; other pope's corresponded with missionaries in England and with Christian English royalty (Pope Bonifatius); the authority of the papacy, and its concern for orthodoxy (Bede)
Investiture
6.2 Latin (Roman) Church Culture
Sending Aug to Britain also meant sending Roman/Latin Church culture northwards (Bede)
Conflicts between Irish/British Christians and Rome over (especially) the date of Easter: the drive towards uniformity and conformity; the papacy laying claim to very certain bounds , where this policy creates a coherent Western civilization: the papacy creates a unified civilization with the same givens (Bede)
The papacy represented the continuity of ancient Rome, which Charlemagne also found important, though when his dynasty never took root the Roman inheritance fell back again onto the papacy
6.3 Clear Church Teaching and Leadership
Church teaching: clear theology e.g. Gregory the Great sees a clear difference between the Old and New Testaments (the New supersedes the Old) (Bede)
6.4 Clerical Corruption and Anti-clericalism
Corrupt papacy – loss of prestige and ability to lead: resulting fragmentation of Christendom
Rich clergy (Dante Hell 7) – early medieval bishops helped protect the people against dragons, serpents, and other natural disasters, as well as representing continuity with the Roman empire in their diocese since they often represented the only capable administration; by the high MA the bishops had become corrupt and distant from the people, no longer pastoring them
Papal reforms especially 11th C.
Increasing curial power; the development of the cardinals
Albigensians and the Albigensian Crusade: the attempt by people, including the laity, to create a pure church separate from the old corrupt one led to the fragmentation of Christendom, which the papacy tried to heal not by reforming the Church and itself but by calling the Albigensian crusade
Scandal: Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales' portrayal of lewd churchmen
7) Politics
7.1 War and Christianity
Bishops as military leaders; war and troops sanctified by priests i.e. Separation between religious and political powers didn't mean that the religious and the political didn't play a role in each other's spheres; close relationship between Christianity and war: Christian kings fought wars (Bede)
Christian spiritual power had military applications i.e. Faith and military prowess (Bede)
Heaven is against the enemy (Bede) – Providential view of Christendom and of history; Christendom was meant to be, guided and protected by the hand of providence; the enemy could be opposed and even crushed because they were outside of this providential history, remnants of the un-elect; Christendom as the elect community of history, where an entire transnational, translinguistic community was the elect, and this sense of the elect made Christendom into a single cultural unit; the military aspect of Christendom had an important part to play in this providence – these were Christ's soldiers fighting Christ's fight (a prefiguring of the Crusaders' sense of fighting for Christ); the military sense actually came from the ideological sense of Christendom and the need to protect it from inner and outer enemied
the Constantinian heritage (Milvian Bridge); Augustine's theory of the just war
Faithfulness and thankfulness of the troops (Bede)
7.2 Conversion through Rulers
Pope Gregory aimed to convert secular leaders because they could convert their subjects and create a Christian society; mass baptisms of leaders, nobles, and the people (Bede)
Worldly power is blessed by God: a kind of divine-right of kings ideology e.g. The Church forces a pagan king to convert so that he can marry a Christian woman (echoes of Das Nibelungenlied) (Bede)
King Edwin, and not the papacy or other agents of the Church, set up the bishopric of York (Bede)
The Christian rulers then guaranteed the continued operation of Christendom by backing the church, though rulers often did fight with the papacy; Thomas a Kempis and how this sometimes didn't work yet how the system itself did continue
7.3 Papacy and Empire
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: 754: Pope Stephen II (752-757) annointed Pepin III “king with holy oil at Reims in 754” -> “reflected the new ruler's need for spiritual underpinning of his authority.” (p. 151) ; Charlemagne and the papacy (pope helped renew the Carolingian church); “Within a short time this monopoly of crowning, anointing and investing with a sword gave the papacy considerable leverage in the choice of a new emperor.” (p. 151); by the 10th C.” “deeply entrenched acceptance of papal authority in Western Christendom.” Widespread belief “that the pope and his synod had the right to impose the discipline of the canon law on lay rulers ... meant that in the longer term a king had to come to terms with the papacy.”; French reforming monasteries promoted papal power over that of French bishops (193)
7.4 Investiture
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: Leo IX (1049-1054) and Hildebrand (Gregory VII 1073-85) wanted to recover the Church's “freedom from lay domination” -> “part of a wider move to enhance the status of the clergy over the laity” and to increase the separation between the 2 orders, “the clerical and the lay” (203); 1077 Canossa: the papacy was trying to become a universal institution: “The transformation in the nature of the papacy in this period reflects wider changes taking place in Western Europe. The ideal of a common Christian society of shared beliefs and culture needed an institutional structure that could no longer be provided by the emperors.” (214)
1122 Concordat of Worms resolved the investiture controversy
8) Christians, heretics, pagans, Muslims
8.1 Clean and Unclean
Heresy treated as unclean; heretics as violators on the way to hell – same as pagans; Catholics (right believers) should avoid these people; i.e. Either-or mentality – no salvation outside the Church ; paganism was devil-worship i.e. Not a neutral choice (Bede)
The filth of hell i.e. The impurity of non-Christians (Dante Hell Canto 6)
Pelagianism (Bede) and Arianism, and how the defeat of these strengthened the papacy; the papacy used its opposition to heretics as a tool for Church centralization
Bishops fight heretics (Bede)
8.2 Aggressive Proselytizing
Aggressive proselytizing (Bede)
Violent destruction of pagan altars, temples (Bede): Gregory of Tours fighting the pagans in late ancient Gaul as a template for later proselytizing
8.3 Fear of Paganism
Constant threat of falling back to idolatry / paganism (Bede)
Culture war against paganism: the Church promoted the division in society between Christians and pagans, which eventually marginalized the pagans (Bede)
8.4 Paganism and the Devil / Demons
The Cross overpowers the devil: belief in demons and the devil; evil is reified; the rejection of demons in becoming Christian; the blood of Christ saves us from the bonds of the devil (Pope Boniface) (Bede)
Aggressive view towards pre-Christian Europe: Greek gods and pagan gods become demons and denizens of hell – the old, pre-Christian world is therefore damned, except in its philosophy; yet even its philosophers cannot be saved since they didn't know God; i.e. Philosophy alone cannot save (Dante) Christendom was to be an all-encompassing community radically inclusive of everyone, where it called each person to responsibility for belief, and to duty before the Christian community; community was naturally, inherently Christian community, and pagans were increasingly sidelined and cast off of the community
8.5 The Crusades
When Pope Urban called for the crusade, Christendom obeyed with great, violent energy; exemplifies the place of the papacy in the medieval imagination / Christendom;
Penitential character of the crusades (First Things)
Expansion of Europe / Christendom
The Other / Enemy is defined outside of Europe as Muslims as it is inside with pagans and Jews -> an increasingly confident, self-assured, expansionist Christendom that had taken its first wobbly steps with Charlemagne in Spain (and the Song of Roland), i.e. The ruler who had with the pope laid the foundation of Europe / Christendom had also laid the foundation of the Crusades by exemplifying Christian military assertiveness against the Muslims, pushing back against Islam
The place of Islam in Christendom's imagination: a heretical religion with which one could never make peace, as exemplified by the savagery of the crusades (Maalouf); the sense that Christendom was on the defensive against the Muslims and had a duty to protect Christendom i.e. Siege mentality to Christendom which was encouraged by the papacy and the Church because it served to unite the West against the enemy at the fringes; the image of the militia christi, perhaps a holdover from Constantine and his victory at Milvian Bridge and a holdover from the warrior, Germanic culture of Northern Europe which had only recently fully converted to Roman Christianity; Christianity had yet failed to sublimate this warrior instinct, so could only channel it away from Europe itself; could there have been a Christendom without Islam? Christendom developed after Islam had developed, so the easy answer is that Islam was essential (La Chanson de Roland and the Reconquista gave a sense in the early medieval period of Christendom)
Richard Coeur de Lion and other heroes of the Crusades
Peter the Venerable and religious zealousness in the Crusades; the pogroms along the Rhineland as a prelude to the massacres in the Holy Land, culminating in the bloodbath in Jerusalem in 1099
Knights Templars: holiness fused with fighting a physical, human enemy rather than the demonic enemy of the Egyptian desert, as fought by the desert fathers
Increased trade with the Muslim world, and imported culture from the Muslim world
Saint Francis in Egypt: the other attempt to convert the Saracens
A sense that Christendom is the centre of the world and the centre of God's plan; that Christendom has the truth and a divine mission to the rest of the world (hence the Albigensian crusade and the religious wars in the Baltics
Christendom is Europe: European culture is Christian culture, and vice versa; to become a Christian demands that one be a European: hence the Crusaders' lack of respect for Christians in Anatolia and the Near East during the Crusades: they often alienated the Armenian, Syrian, Oriental, and Greek Christians; 1204 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople and stole art treasures, which they brought back to the “true” centre of Christendom, which was Rome and Italy; the forced unification and Romanization of the Greek Church at Constantinople, with a Latin patriarch; the Crusaders' failure to keep their promise and hand Antioch back to the Byzantine Emperor; the Crusades were to make the Holy Land as extension of Christendom/Europe/the Latin world, rather than a way to support the Byzantine emperor in his fight against the Turks i.e. The crusaders did not work with the Byzantine Emperor, but went as colonizers
“Le monde barnarisé sur lequel agit et dans lequel baigne l'Eglise du hait Moyen Age est un monde extraverti, tourné vers des tâches extérieurs, vers des proies ou des fins matérielles: la conquête, la nourriture, le pouvoir, le salut dans l'au-delà. C'est un monde, disons primitif, qui si définit par des attitudes, des conduites, des gestes. Les gens ne peuvent y être jugés que sur des actes, non sur des sentiments.” (Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, p. 169): (ME) and the crusades were the last great expression of this germanic extroversion/Christian warrior-ism, after which Christians and the Church increasingly turned inward and psychological, which promoted individualism and subjectivity. Christian warriors were after this confined to the romances and arthurian literature developed during and after the Crusades. Allegory also developed, as in Le Roman de la Rose and the Divine Comedy.
8.6 Heretics in the High Middle Ages
Heretics go to hell (Dante)
First part of Middle Ages: the Church is not strong enough to militarily confront heretics (Pelagians in Britain (Bede)) but they aggressively proselytize; Second part of Middle Ages: the Church is strong enough to call on men of arms to hunt down and eliminate heretical groups: Albigensians, Waldensians, Jan Hus, John Wycliff; the Inquisition;
Joachim of Fiora “was not alone by any means. There were many more heterodox and really heretical movements in the twelfth century, marked by rejection of some of the most important doctrines of the Church, the throwing off of all authority, and frank rebellion.” - including the Waldensians, the Albigensians, Arnold of Brescia (Merton p. 173, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) According to Merton, Joachim “was accepted, trusted and blessed by the popes.... He must not be loosely equated with the heretics. He was universally respected and approved by the Church, and his work was posthumously condemned only after his disciples had caused it to be interpreted in dangerous ways, and hotheads had in fact appealed to him to justify rebellion.”
Conclusion
(p. 156-7 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) Because of Pelagianism, Montanism and Manicheism (Tertullian) : “the background of Western spirituality we find {marked by} this uneasy division and anxiety on the question of grace and effort, along with tendencies to activism, to violent controversy ..., to pessimism, to a juridical and authoritarian outlook, and a pronounced anti-mystical current.”
Bibliography of Primary Works
Annales regni Francorum, Annales Fuldenses /Annales Vedastines
Annales Xantenses
Anselm
Augustine, De Civitate Dei
Bede, Historia
Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict
Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae
Bonaventure
Cantar de mio Cid
Carmina Burana
La Chanson de Roland
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier de la Charette
Parcival
da Varagine,Jacopo, Legenda Aurea, or Legenda Sanctorum.
Dante, De Monarchia
Divina Comedia
De Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum
de Joinville, Jean Vie de Saint Louis
Donatio Constantini
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni
Gesta Romanorum
Gratian, Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum
Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis
Life of Saint Benedict
Historia Brittonum
Historia Caroli Magni / Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle
Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe
Liber Pontificalis
Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform
Das Niebelungenlied
Otto von Freising, Gesta Friderici Imperatoris
Palatina, Bartolomeo, Lives of the Popes
Plotinus
Le Roman de la Rose
Sacrementaria Gregoriana
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Summa contra Gentiles
The Cloud of Unknowing
Bibliography of Secondary Works
Collins, Roger, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy. Basic Books. 2009.
Foley, Edward. From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minnesota: Order of Saint Benedict. 2008.
Le Goff, Jacques. Un Moyen Age en images. Paris: Editions Hazan. 2007.
Pour un autre Moyen Age. Gallimard. 2001.
Maalouf, Amin. Les Croisades vues par les Arabes: La Barbarie franque en terre sainte. Paris” J'ai Lu. 2007.
Merton, Thomas. An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3. Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 2008.
Mullins, Edwin. Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire.
Christendom was created and sustained by the papacy, and when the corruption of the papal court had become too entrenched through the centuries, Christendom broke up. Papal leadership made and sustained Christendom. Yet rather than total domination from Rome, this was done with great variety and diversity of outlook. Rather than faithfully following the papacy in every little detail, it was the shared broad vision of this world that Christendom took from the papacy. This happened even when the papacy or pope himself was unpopular.
1) Social and Cultural Generalities; Popular Belief; Saints
1.1 Medieval images of Christ
Christ as warrior: Christ descending to hell on Holy Saturday (Dante Hell Canto 4); Christ fighting the devil and paying a ransom (Anselm; Aquinas); Christ who fights evil; what kind of grace does this lead to? Masculine God of grace or feminized God of sentimental love?
Feminizing images of Christendom (being married to Christ; images of Christ as a nurturing mother); Bernard of Clairvaux; Hedewijch and the female mystics; feminized, sentimental love
Mary: Her increasing place after 1000 as intercessor – God is close to the individual concerns; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux; Mechtild of Magdeburg (Mary as goddess)
Augustine's Christology and soteriology; Platonism and neo-Platonism in Aug: and influences on popular belief
Bonaventure: “there is no separation between theology and mysticism in Albert [the Great] any more than in Bonaventure.”1 ; Bonaventure's mysticism i.e. Knowing Christ personally; Bonaventure's Platonism
1.2 Church Control
Church controlled marriage (Bede): As the Church gained more and more conversions, it was able to control family life. This gave Christianity power over people's most intimate lives, and also allowed for the Church to control the upbringing of children. Increased Church control of marriage resulted in infant baptisms becoming the norm, as Christian families were formed. Paganism was increasingly marginalized, as pagans could no longer turn to their families for support when the Church was changing other aspects of society.
“this identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature that distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history” - the Church was of the world, “appearing as a state alongside other states, with its own law courts, tax system, and bureaucracy.”(Foley 186-7)
The Church controlled the economy: was the final arbiter on which occupations were sinful and which were not – the Church's blessing of a profession meant that that profession could expand and take off; it had more prestige; medieval corporations under the tutelage of the Church, including have an official patron saint and religious duties, symbolized by the corporation's sponsorship of a window in a church (Le Goff); Usury a sin (Dante, Hell Canto 11)
1.3 Medieval Christian Imagination
“Sans avoir de centre dominant (Rome qui aurait pu et dû l'être était trop excentrique; Jérusalem fût, même au temps des croisades et du royaume latin de Terre sainte, un centre surtout symbolique; et l'Empire, après l'éphémère installation de Charlemagne à Aix-la-Chapelle, n'eut pas de capitale), la Chrétienté se constitua un territoire central.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 16) ; Le Goff: the peripheral areas were important, especially for evangelization: This was so because (I'm talking here) the papacy had given this vision for Christendom to follow.
“Une des étranges caractéristiques de l'espace de l'Occident médiéval est d'avoir eu des centres idéologiques périphériques ou externes.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36) -> Because its spiritual centre was external to it, Christendom became more and more open to new or strange ideas, including the gradual re-introduction of Aristotle into its philosophy. One of the results of the tragedy of the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 was the import into Italy and therefore the West of Greek art and books, for which Christendom hungered. It acknowledged its backwardness and its dependence on other areas for its spiritual and intellectual roots and growth.
12th C.: “la nostalgie de cette centralité [Rome] perdue mais conservée dans l'imaginaire.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36) Thus, even when Rome, that is, the papacy, didn't function well or was corrupt, the ideology of the papacy and Roman leadership carried it for decades, if not centuries. Christendom's centre was a spiritual rather than physical location; Christendom, which eventually grew into the modern West that continues this tradition, was more about an idea than it was about something physical. They weren't building a material civilization, but a spiritual one.
The medieval imagination, while demanding concrete manifestations of God through miracles and other works, also had a great capacity for the beyond, the non-physical. The medieval imagination was an imagination of absence as well as presence, where heaven or Jerusalem became the Platonic ideals for this world. With no internal centre, Christendom looked to a spiritual centre, whose physical location was Jerusalem and whose real, spiritual location was heaven. This life was therefore ephemeral, a journey, to something much more substantial.
2) The Bible
The Bible was the greatest source of the medieval imagination.
2.1 Bible as Reference
The Bible and life in reference to it; King Ethelfrith is compared to Saul (Bede)
The centrality of Jerusalem as the city of God reflects the love for the Bible, as Bonaventure's following words show not only the medieval love for the biblical Jerusalem, but for the reign of God's peace that medieval Christians believed it had known in history: “ Rogate quae ad pacem sunt Ierusalem. Sciebat enim, quod thronus Salomonis non erat nisi in pace, cum scriptum sit: In pace factus est locus eius, et habitatio eius in Sion.”2
Love of the Bible (Bede)
2.2 The Vulgate
Helps to centralize the Church under Rome and to ensure that all of Christendom is Latin – makes Latin the unifying language of Christendom; one of the most important commonalities; the Vulgate Bible was the primary reference point for Christendom and the creation of the medieval imagination, as it provided for the common language
In the exclusive hands of the clergy, helped promote the clerical-lay division of Christendom i.e. The clerical nature of Christendom (the clerics were the protectors and promoters of Christendom, as well as among the chief beneficiaries). Christendom was in the hands of the clergy, and the laity were outside of much of what it offered and stood for.
2.3 Illuminated Manuscripts; the Bible and Art (Cathedral Sculpture)
2.4 Eschatology and the Book of Revelation
Eschatological sense to the Middle Ages (Bede): Medieval Christians waited for the coming of Christ. They were a Pentecostal people; signs of the end were everywhere; they dealt with natural or social disasters, as well as war, as signs from heaven that the end was near, and that these events had great, cosmic meaning; Christendom was caught up in the centre of a great cosmic drama; medieval mystery plays
Augustinian eschatology -> Bonaventure's eschatology (Franciscan eschatology)
Joachim of Fiore: his “prophetic books” were “a powerful criticism of the clergy and its corruption, and point, as divine remedy, to a providential cleansing and a destruction of institutional Christianity, to be replaced by the 'Eternal Gospel' of the Holy Ghost. Joachim foretold a new age of 'love and freedom' as opposed to authority and despotism. The Church was, in the new age of the Holy Spirit, to be ruled by contemplatives, and by the Holy Spirit through them.”3 ; Joachim's use of the Bible
Dante
(Read http://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/20/Religiologiques20PDF/20(087-111)Boglioni.pdf) (http://www.colbud.hu/main_old/PubArchive/PL/PL20-Vauchez.pdf)
Various prophets of the apocalypse (Hildegard of Bingen (?))
3) Saints
3.1 Early Medieval Saints and Bishops and their Unique Teaching Office
Early medieval saints and bishops: Power over nature; connection between the physical world and the spiritual-Christian world (Bede)
Miracles: Sight to the blind (Bede): Christianity replaced paganism as the way to improve one's lot in this world as well. Believers' lives improved in the here and now; i.e. The material benefits of Christianity, and how it reorganized society
A miracle solved the issue (Bede): Miracles were also sources of power for saints and for the Church. Through miracles people believed. God became tangible through miracles. In this sense, as with the sacraments, the idea of Christendom, which had God at the apex, was made concrete and physical for all to see. Medieval folk looked for signs of God's existence everywhere. Even the great doctors of the Church, such as Thomas Aquinas, looked for signs through analogy.
Relics and totemism (Bede): Relics, as with miracle-producing preachers and saints, were conduits of the divine. People expected them to produce miracles, and used them as a focus for their prayers. Instead of going to the doctor or a hospital, people placed their hopes for cures in relics. Relics were therefore a source of great hope and joy, and were central to medieval Christendom. In a way, they had a eucharistic or sacramental function. As the Church moved peasant Christians further and further away from the Eucharist, the people practiced popular devotions.
Power of God shown everywhere; always looking for signs, since there was division between faith/God and nature; nature was a second revelation (Bede) God's power was real in this world, and was not, at least in the early Middle Ages, seen in psychological terms. The inner disposition of the person was not as important as the outward signs. An analogy between the created world and the reality of God was taken for granted.
3.2 Ideals of Conversion and Sainthood
The ideal behavior of a saint and saintly conversion, which included tears; prophecy of the saint; visions; messages from heaven; oracles (Bede): Conversion bestowed on a person the power of the Holy Spirit. In the saints, this power manifested itself in a particularly strong, visible way, through spiritual and physical power. These signs were a requirement for being a saint. Sainthood was not a psychological category, but a category of power, especially healing power.
3.3 Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's Confessions as the paradigm of personal reflection and psychology of faith, struggle, and ultimate conversion
Historiography (City of God): how did Christendom see its earthly vocation; Christendom had a vocation and was about more than power – more than about accumulating and spending power; its had meaning in history, as it made up the new Israel – it continued not only Rome but Jerusalem as well, thus answering Tertullian's question, What do Rome and Jerusalem have in common?
Merton p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “The Augustinian theology, inseparable from the drama of Augustine's own conversion and of his whole life, comes to give all the spirituality of the West a special character of its own.” ... “this overwhelming influence of Augustine.” especially in the Cistercians, the Franciscans (esp after Bonaventure)
Augustinian anthropology and epistemology underscored much of Christendom. Platonism. Manicheism.
“The personality of Augustine and his Mysticism: the drama and conflict of Augustine not only profoundly and definitively shaped his own spirituality, but through him reached down to most of the medieval mystics of the Christian West.”4 (Merton still, p. 158): “His mysticism is highly reflexive and subjective. All that is said about subjective piety in the West, all the attempts to lay the blame on this or that later mystic, remind us to look to Augustine as to the real source.... His 'subjectivity' is obviously quite compatible with a deep sacramental and liturgical piety and above all with a profound sense of the Church.” ; (p.158): “His mysticism is therefore closely bound up with psychological observation, especially reflection on the workings of mystical experience, its roots, etc.”: “This psychology reaches into his anthropology itself, with the Trinitarian structure of the image of God in man. This is found everywhere in the West after Augustine.”
Also Aug's dramatic interior struggle with evil influences the West after him (Merton 158) (MORE from MERTON)
3.4 Saint Francis of Assisi as the Second Christ
Francis seemed to usher in a new epoch, as testified by the beliefs of Joachim di Fiore and Bonaventure. Francis as the second Christ. (“...et dedit dominus noster Christus; cuius praedicationis repetitor fuit pater noster Franciscus, in omni sua praedicatione pacem in principio et in fine annuntians, in omni salutatione pacem optans, in omni contemplatione ad exstaticam pacem suspirans, tanquam civis illius Ierusalem, de qua dicit vir ille pacis, qui cum his qui oderunt pacem, erat pacificus: Rogate quae ad pacem sunt Ierusalem.”5 For Bonaventure, Francis' sainthood includes participating in Christendom's vision of Jerusalem as the city of the savior and a spiritual city of God. Francis is the saint of peace, rather than a Christian warrior who crusades or fights in Spain. Francis helps popularize the inwards sense of spiritual struggle, where the penitential movement didn't fight the Saracens but went inward and individual. Christendom had peacemaking saints, as the Church worked to construct peace within Christendom; it was not acceptable for Christians to fight against one another.
Francis' response to clerical corruption, heretics (Waldensians), and the new bourgeois money economy. “The Franciscan movement is especially tied up with the Joachimite prophecies, and when the crisis of the order ensued, the Spiritual Franciscans looked back to Joachim for their inspiration and carried on a bitter struggle”6; Dante: Joachim in Heaven, circle 12
The institutionalization and watering-down of the Franciscan ideal: the split in the order (the Spirituals); St. Bonaventure and his spirituality and leadership of the Franciscans. The energy of the Franciscans led to a new evangelization of the urban areas. The friars bring contemplation to far-flung urban areas throughout Europe, whereas the monastics had been rural fixtures
The friars at the University of Paris: this went against the spirit of Francis, who believed in a simple, humble, almost anti-intellectual spirituality, a philosophy of Christ rather than one of the universities. Yet because these friars, along with the Dominicans, were at the forefront of the new evangelization, they found themselves at the forefront of the new, urban education and theology, which, while in continuity with the Cathedral schools, were a break from the monastic theology and learning which had previously dominated. Learning in Christendom became urban, separated from liturgy and spirituality, and eventually sponsored the division of philosophy from theology. Christendom gained much from the renewal group, the Franciscans, but needed to tame it, something it had failed to do with the Cathars and Waldensians.
Francis brought mysticism out of the monasteries and into the world.7
4) Spirituality and Theology 1: Sin and Damnation
4.1 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life
As stated above, much of this is rooted in Aug's psychological turmoil and psychological reading of the virtues / the good and sin / evil. Manicheism.
Theology begins to speak more and more to the inner lives of people rather than to the outer, legalistic and behavioral aspects; the sacraments are only one aspect of this, since most people do not have regular access to these; those who do have regular access are also turning inwards; individualization of spirituality - the sinner is alone before God and he/she rather than the community answers for sin; structural or communal sin is not a priority; Dante's hell is primarily a place of the individual; communities are not damned; individuals are, so there is a pre-eminence of the individual soul and a basic equality of humans even with the great hierarchical society of the MA
Avarice, which even touches the Church and its cardinal and other clerics (Dante, Hell 7)
Psychology of anger (Dante Hell 7; 9)
Despair, sin; virtue (Dante)
Pride: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante's psychological and sociological analysis of sin (Dante Hell 11) reflects the increasingly individualistic side of Christianity. Christendom allowed at this point for the development of the individual.
The psychology behind the sin of fraud (Dante Hell 11)
Deepening self-analysis / self-psychology and sense of one's own thoughts (Dante Hell 13)
4.2 Hell and Damnation
Church teaching: People scared of hell; the church policy was to deliberately scare people; belief in original sin; heavy guilt, which even virtues don't get rid of (Bede)
Augustine's Original Sin; sexuality (Confessions)
Medieval mystery plays – the devil and his trickery, and the gullibility of Christians, who are ensnared by him
Final judgement (Dante Hell 6); can't escape who your were while on earth when you die (Dante Hell 14) A direct, immediate line between one's earthly actions and eternity in hell exists in Christendom. Morality was about keeping yourself out of hell primarily, and only in selected writings and people was morality and spirituality about coming to know God. Building the kingdom of God on earth was not the job of Christians, but saving themselves and others from punishment.
God's justice is fearful: the damned cannot escape their unrepented sins (Dante Hell 12); the vengeance of God, and punishment of hell comes from God (Dante Hell Canto 14) Fear of hell and of God's justice permeated the world in which medieval Christians lived. Decisions and actions carried out in this world had eternal meaning and significance. Christendom was an otherworldly ideology that didn't see itself building anything permanent now. It operated under a sense of waiting and expectation for better things to come, if only people could behave. Because sin and punishment were individual, the Church and Christendom had a growing preoccupation with the individual. The salvation of a soul depended more on the individual than on the society. Society served the individual in that it served to educate and support the individual and his soul on the hopeful journey to salvation. The individual did not exist to serve the society in a salvatory sense. Thus Dante meets and talks with individual souls in hell. While some of these were certainly part of a greater movement and may have been heavily influenced by someone else, in the end the individual soul had to pay the price; the commune didn't exist in hell. Dante imagines no society in hell, under which the individual soul is subsumed. At no point to individuals melt away into the collective, and on the Day of Judgment this won't happen either.
The sense that life is short and eternal life is long (Dante Hell 12); the need for repentance (Purgatorio 3 (i think)
4.3 Defilement of the Natural World
Spirituality: The defilement of the secular world, and the love for the contemplative life, even by those (clerics) who serve secular church or government interests (Bede); Pope Gregory the Great would have loved to remain a monk rather than serve as pope, which was a burden
5) Spirituality and Theology 2: The Church's Teachings
5.1 The Monastic Life
The high esteem for monks and the monastic life; the rejection of worldly living for monastic spirituality i.e. The superiority of monastic spirituality over lay spirituality (Bede): “the sole hope of salvation, of remission of an individual's sins, lay with the prayers of the monks... in this frightened and unstable world.” (Mullins 8)
St. Benedict and his rule; Cluniac reform; the Cistercians: theology, their support for the papacy instead of the local bishop aided the centralization of Christendom under the papacy and prevented any ecclesiastical rivals to the pope from developing in the West: aside from a Council no one could hope to rival the papacy;
Monastic theological and spiritual writings influenced Christendom, including the papacy itself.
The development of Latin church culture i.e. Church culture was not primarily a vernacular culture, though mystery plays and popular devotions developed in parallel to ecclesiastical Latin
The development of book culture and how monasteries were the great publishing houses of Europe, and through this they came to influence the papacy itself, as in Gaul's monasteries' writings on liturgy (Germanization of the Eucharist); spirituality became bookish, about orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy; this book culture meant that Christendom's religion was more and more bookish and university-oriented, and less and less from the people or from the liturgy – the great synthesis and unity of Christendom did not mean that every element in the schema participated fully in the ordering of things; these gaps were to be the undoing of Christendom
Monasteries at the heart of Christendom, including spiritual, theological, but also social and economic: “it was the monasteries that held a vital key in the shaping of a new Europe. They acted as colleges, patrons of art and architecture, moral guardians, benevolent landlords, founders of social services, centers of capital wealth, as well as being institutions of vast political influence on an international scale, with the ear of kings, emperors, and popes.” (Mullins, p. 7)
The Rule of Benedict and the salvatory role of labor” work as penitence – work was bad because it was divine punishment for original sin, but the monks gave labor prestige because they gave penitence and humility prestige (Le Goff); Christendom was a penitential culture, which meant that innovation and creativity only happened in certain areas that served penance or were released from the need for penance (like the theology professor)
How monks drained swamps and built up agriculture i.e. Citeaux the swamp became the source of the Cistercians, who went to the forested fringes of Europe and worked what hitherto had been unworkable land (Cluny, Cistercians)
5.2 The Sacraments: The Eucharist
Germanization of the Eucharist: e.g. “vessels were not only forged of precious metals, they underwent a special rite of blessing or consecration.” (Foley 177) – Christendom synthesized the Germanic spiritual worldview and the Latin theological worldview; the old spirits and practices of the northern peoples were transmuted into Latin Christian practices, including the changing of gods/goddesses into saints and angels
Transubstantiation (Aquinas; 4th Lateran Council); the magic and drama of the Germans; The Blood of Jesus; Eucharistic devotions; the body that suffers ->suffering
Theology of the Eucharist
Increasing division between the clergy and the laity -> the laity are not close to the Eucharist and can't even see it; strict hierarchy (Foley); before the pagans were considered unclean by the church, who now sees Christian lay as unclean, and doesn't completely trust them, especially that they are 100% 'clean' of paganism - the laity are to be kept under control, as they are peasants who are close to nature and therefore to the devil (?); they speak the vernacular rather than the church's language; some of their priests cannot even say Latin mass – a great disruption in Christendom was the lack of integration of the laity, which was a cause of the Reformation and the ultimate end of Christendom – Christendom failed to fully integrate the people; Christendom was not a people's ideology or a “people's program” with the “whole people of God”; Christendom was thus radically inclusive and exclusive at the same time, where this suspicion on the part of the Church signalled that the evangelization of Europe had not been complete
“a sustained emphasis on the unworthiness of the laity.... Unworthy people did not go to communion regularly, and offertory processions were eliminated in many places.” (Foley 167)
Increasing liturgical confusion and innovation: “Popular devotion focused on seeing the host rather than receiving it: (Foley 194); indulgences, Masses for the dead – brought the liturgy into every aspect of people's lives, as they may have had pagan rites for the dead before the Church came
The 8th sacrament: Knighthood (La Chanson de Roland; Percival ou la Quete du Grail; ) - the unity of Christendom, and of how even fighting men had to order their consciences to God's plan
Ordination in Germanic Europe: “multiple rites that invested the priest with new powers, including the ability to move things from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred, and effectively moved him from one realm to the other as well.” (Foley 177); the integration of the Germanic peoples, away from the earlier Arianism
5.3 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life; Mysticism
Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Merton notes after quoting from it: “Here love and prayer are contrasted with study, which is incapable of bringing us to union. Note however that St. Bonaventure certainly stresses the unity of the intellectual and spiritual lives as much as anyone ever did.” (An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.,p. 152) In Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Bonaventure describes his individual spiritual experience as something of importance for the Church and his own teaching, as theology becomes interior, individual, somewhat subjective, and experiential: “ad montem Alvernae tanquam ad locum quietum amore quaerendi pacem spiritus declinarem, ibique existens, dum mente tractarem aliquas mentales ascensiones in Deum, inter alia occurrit illud miraculum, quod in praedicto loco contigit ipso beato Francisco, de visione scilicet Seraph alati ad instar Crucifixi. In cuius consideratione statim visum est mihi, quod visio illa praetenderet ipsius patris suspensionem in contemplando et viam, per quam pervenitur ad eam.”8
This important spiritual experience happened outside of the liturgy and the rites of the Church. Individual subjective experiences by both men and women were having an unprecedented, revolutionary impact on the Church. Catherine of Siena's (I think) mysticism led her to give advice to the pope, which he took seriously. It led Julian of Norwich to become, outside of the clergy-only confessional, a spiritual adviser to members of all strata of her society. This pentecostal, opening up of the spiritual life in Christendom happened at the time of the institutional Church's greatest power and the greatest separation of clergy and lay. It allowed for revolutionary levels of freedom, as the Church slowly lost control to mystics, visionaries, and others from all walks of life who took the personal initiative.
Bonaventure's above words also indicated that the path to God was increasingly seen in mystical, individual light rather than in a corporate, sacramental, ritualistic light. Note how his spiritual searching did not occur during the Mass. The above words also reflect the advanced level of mystical prayer that was occurring at this time, as well as the attempt by Christians as individuals to articulate these experiences. At this time, most of this articulation was within the bounds of orthodox theology. For Bonaventure, love is the key to the spiritual life: “Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi, qui adeo Paulum ad tertium caelum raptum7 transformavit in Christum, ut diceret: Christo confixus sum cruci, iam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus; qui etiam adeo mentem Francisci absorbuit.”9 Bonaventure adds that one can enter this path only through the crucifixion, without mentioning the sacraments, before warning against entering by the wide gate, that is, the gate of hell. Thus the virtues and the vices play an increasing role in salvation.
Bonaventure next acknowledges that the Blood of Christ saves, but he doesn't specify as to whether this is the blood of the historical event of the crucifixion, a once and for all event, or the blood of Christ available to all Christians for all ages through the Eucharist. This lack of precision contrasts with the precise formulations of Aquinas and other scholastics ot only concerning the Eucharist, but all areas of theology. Bonaventure has his own precision in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, but it is the psychological and spiritual precision of the mystic, of one concerned with the subjective spiritual life.
Bonaventure: Knowledge comes from God. Christians receive this knowledge rather than create it or find it. At the beginning of his work Itinerarium Mentis in Deum he notes his and Christendom's debt to God: “In principio primum principium, a quo cunctae illuminationes descendunt tanquam a Patre luminum, a quo est omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum.”10 Illumination comes through revelation because there is a greater knowledge, a knowledge of the perfectly real, which reflects Plato's idea that humans were living in the half-dark, and that the truth, of which we could know only a little, existed in the perfect, fullest sense.
Christendom thus became defined as the place of prayer, with a culture of prayer to go along with the external rites and the militia christi as increasing numbers of mystics and church leaders teach and write about prayer techniques, and as the Church becomes more and more a Church of prayer and not only of rites and credal formulations: “Desideria autem in nobis inflammantur dupliciter, scilicet per clamorem orationis, quae rugire facit a gemitu cordis, et per fulgorem speculationis, qua mens ad radios lucis directissime et intensissime se convertit.”11 Here again, the following words reflect an almost total neglect of the place of the sacraments, including the Eucharist, in the Christian spiritual journey, and many aspects, including the individual, affective, spiritualized components of the following words, could easily find their place in the Protestant Reformation, or later Lutheran Quietist spirituality: “Igitur ad gemitum orationis per Christum crucifixum, per cuius sanguinem purgamur a sordibus vitiorum, primum quidem lectorem invito, ne forte credat quod sibi sufficiat lectio sine unctione, speculatio sine devotione, investigatio sine admiratione, circumspectio sine exsultatione, industria sine pietate, scientia sine caritate, intelligentia sine humilitate, studium absque divina gratia, speculum absque sapientia divinitus inspirata.”12
This kind of mysticism frequently sounds close to Pelagianism in the emphasis on human effort and the minimal discussion of divine grace. The spiritual life and its fruits are not a gift from God, but something that Christians are to reach in their zealousness: “Exerce igitur te, homo Dei, prius ad stimulum conscientiae remordentem, antequam oculos eleves ad radios sapientiae in eius speculis relucentes, ne forte ex ipsa radiorum speculatione in graviorem incidas foveam tenebrarum.”13 Yet a little later in the same work Bonaventure does acknowledge that we cannot lift ourselves up through our own strength, but only through the help of a greater power.
Bonaventure's writings also reflect the increasingly psychological view of the person and Christian spirituality, as Christendom took a turn towards the person and the psychology of the individual: “ Secundum hunc triplicem progressum mens nostra tres habet aspectus principales. Unus est ad corporalia exteriora, secundum quem vocatur animalitas seu sensualitas: alius intra se et in se, secundum quem dicitur spiritus; tertius supra se, secundum quem dicitur mens.”14
Virtue is interpreted psychologically (Dante)
5.4 Purgatory and Suffering
Hope is the purpose of Purgatory (Dante Purgatorio 2); righteous punishment for sins that prepares the Christian to see God (Dante Purgatorio 1,3); homecoming to God (Dante Purgatorio 1)
Christian life as a journey; go deeper, i.e. There are no shortcuts in the spiritual life (Dante Purgatorio 1); Bonaventure and the inward journey
“La forêt devient le desert chrétien avec ses tentations, ses dangers, mais fût aussi le le lieu d'un accès privilégié à Dieu.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Image, p. 41)
5.5 Faith and Reason
The reasonableness of faith (Dante Hell Canto 11); the mystery of the Trinity (Dante Purgatorio 3)
Aquinas and Aristotle -> the need to Christianize Aristotle before he can be accepted within Christendom i.e. Separation of philosophy and theology, but theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, which means that theology wtill has the last word on the limits of philosophy; philosophy without faith: the destiny of the great pagan philosophers (Dante Purgatorio 3): A philosophy without Christian faith cannot save people, and leads to an eternal dissatisfaction.
The scholastics and the University of Paris; Abelard's new teaching style, which was an aggressive, confrontational style that shook theology and gave no comfortable answers, but challenged authority and the tradition instead: philosophy no longer guards tradition and theology, but challenges it and questions everything; it is all right to question things
Abelard versus Bernard of Clairvaux: the separation of theology from liturgy and from prayer/contemplation, as theology becomes a university subject, objectified as something to be studied and analyzed rather than as the life-giving source of the community; theology becomes the domain of experts who fragment theology into its various disciplines
Anselm and the use of philosophy to prove God's existence
The Dominicans (and the University of Paris and the papacy) as guardians of orthodoxy: theology (such as regarding the Eucharist or ecclesiology (Gratian's Decretals)) becomes much more defined and precise; theology becomes a science and moves further and further away from the liturgy and prayer / contemplation (including the monasteries) as its centre becomes the university, with philosophy becoming increasingly independent of theology (unlike Islam?) and an increasing threat to the Summas of the time
The great theological summas as another counter to the heretical – Christendom's attempt to bring everything into a (theological) whole, understandable philosophically
The natural law; and how nature follows the mind of God (Dante Hell Canto 11); Aquinas' analogy from nature; natural law as an example of how philosophy supports
theology; Platonism and Aristotelian roots -> synthesis of Greek reason and Hebrew transcendence i.e. Christendom / the Middle Ages was the time of synthesis as well as summa, where everything was to be ordered and united – a unitary view of the world, where everyone and everything, including knowledge, has its ordered place – is not a revolutionary or reforming (semper reformanda) mindset or theology; theologians and the Church magisterium aim to preserve rather than to find the new and the creative; creativity was the creativity of expressing this unity, as in the creativity of the summas
“scholastic theology was becoming more and more a speculative science and less and less a wisdom, even though the great theologians kept stressing the sapiential aspect of it.” ... “with the great love for scholastic thought there was developed a kind of contempt for patristic and strictly religious wisdom, and for contemplation as such.” (152 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.)s
5.6 Late Medieval Lay Piety
Tauler, Eckhart, the Beguines, Hadewijch; the Brethren of the Common Life; the Theologia Mystica; the Rhineland Mystics: 14th C. msytics: “under the influence of the school of Cologne etc. where Albert the Great taught, were strongly Dominican and Dionysian, with an intellectual stress, even a speculative character, that prevented their Dionysian trend from becoming exclusively affective and anti-intellectual. Normally, we find that the mystics of darkness of the Rhenish and English schools are strongly Thomistic.” (p. 153 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism); The Cloud of Unknowing (Dionysian according to Merton); Merton: 155: “The Dominicans begin to break away from the dominance of Augustine and it is in the Rhenish mystics, largely under Dominican infuence or actually Dominicans themselves, that we see Dionysius preponderant over Augustine.”
(p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “Bridal mysticism {is} affective, cataphatic, erotic, a mysticism of desire and espousal, {with} a stress on the faculties of the soul, especially the will; {it is} generally Augustinian {and} tends to be anti-intellectual.”
Increasing individualism (Le Goff); Merton 174 An Introduction to Christian Mysticism
Pilgrimage: The Book of Margery Kemp, and how she was harassed, accused of Lollardry by the bishops as she went on her pilgrimage
The virtues: Humility: bishops discussing whether to follow Aug's tradition, will only if he shows he is humble (Bede)
6) Ecclesiastical Affairs
6.1 The role of the papacy
Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries (and encouraged them when they wanted to give up), including Augustine, to Britain; other pope's corresponded with missionaries in England and with Christian English royalty (Pope Bonifatius); the authority of the papacy, and its concern for orthodoxy (Bede)
Investiture
6.2 Latin (Roman) Church Culture
Sending Aug to Britain also meant sending Roman/Latin Church culture northwards (Bede)
Conflicts between Irish/British Christians and Rome over (especially) the date of Easter: the drive towards uniformity and conformity; the papacy laying claim to very certain bounds , where this policy creates a coherent Western civilization: the papacy creates a unified civilization with the same givens (Bede)
The papacy represented the continuity of ancient Rome, which Charlemagne also found important, though when his dynasty never took root the Roman inheritance fell back again onto the papacy
6.3 Clear Church Teaching and Leadership
Church teaching: clear theology e.g. Gregory the Great sees a clear difference between the Old and New Testaments (the New supersedes the Old) (Bede)
6.4 Clerical Corruption and Anti-clericalism
Corrupt papacy – loss of prestige and ability to lead: resulting fragmentation of Christendom
Rich clergy (Dante Hell 7) – early medieval bishops helped protect the people against dragons, serpents, and other natural disasters, as well as representing continuity with the Roman empire in their diocese since they often represented the only capable administration; by the high MA the bishops had become corrupt and distant from the people, no longer pastoring them
Papal reforms especially 11th C.
Increasing curial power; the development of the cardinals
Albigensians and the Albigensian Crusade: the attempt by people, including the laity, to create a pure church separate from the old corrupt one led to the fragmentation of Christendom, which the papacy tried to heal not by reforming the Church and itself but by calling the Albigensian crusade
Scandal: Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales' portrayal of lewd churchmen
7) Politics
7.1 War and Christianity
Bishops as military leaders; war and troops sanctified by priests i.e. Separation between religious and political powers didn't mean that the religious and the political didn't play a role in each other's spheres; close relationship between Christianity and war: Christian kings fought wars (Bede)
Christian spiritual power had military applications i.e. Faith and military prowess (Bede)
Heaven is against the enemy (Bede) – Providential view of Christendom and of history; Christendom was meant to be, guided and protected by the hand of providence; the enemy could be opposed and even crushed because they were outside of this providential history, remnants of the un-elect; Christendom as the elect community of history, where an entire transnational, translinguistic community was the elect, and this sense of the elect made Christendom into a single cultural unit; the military aspect of Christendom had an important part to play in this providence – these were Christ's soldiers fighting Christ's fight (a prefiguring of the Crusaders' sense of fighting for Christ); the military sense actually came from the ideological sense of Christendom and the need to protect it from inner and outer enemied
the Constantinian heritage (Milvian Bridge); Augustine's theory of the just war
Faithfulness and thankfulness of the troops (Bede)
7.2 Conversion through Rulers
Pope Gregory aimed to convert secular leaders because they could convert their subjects and create a Christian society; mass baptisms of leaders, nobles, and the people (Bede)
Worldly power is blessed by God: a kind of divine-right of kings ideology e.g. The Church forces a pagan king to convert so that he can marry a Christian woman (echoes of Das Nibelungenlied) (Bede)
King Edwin, and not the papacy or other agents of the Church, set up the bishopric of York (Bede)
The Christian rulers then guaranteed the continued operation of Christendom by backing the church, though rulers often did fight with the papacy; Thomas a Kempis and how this sometimes didn't work yet how the system itself did continue
7.3 Papacy and Empire
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: 754: Pope Stephen II (752-757) annointed Pepin III “king with holy oil at Reims in 754” -> “reflected the new ruler's need for spiritual underpinning of his authority.” (p. 151) ; Charlemagne and the papacy (pope helped renew the Carolingian church); “Within a short time this monopoly of crowning, anointing and investing with a sword gave the papacy considerable leverage in the choice of a new emperor.” (p. 151); by the 10th C.” “deeply entrenched acceptance of papal authority in Western Christendom.” Widespread belief “that the pope and his synod had the right to impose the discipline of the canon law on lay rulers ... meant that in the longer term a king had to come to terms with the papacy.”; French reforming monasteries promoted papal power over that of French bishops (193)
7.4 Investiture
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: Leo IX (1049-1054) and Hildebrand (Gregory VII 1073-85) wanted to recover the Church's “freedom from lay domination” -> “part of a wider move to enhance the status of the clergy over the laity” and to increase the separation between the 2 orders, “the clerical and the lay” (203); 1077 Canossa: the papacy was trying to become a universal institution: “The transformation in the nature of the papacy in this period reflects wider changes taking place in Western Europe. The ideal of a common Christian society of shared beliefs and culture needed an institutional structure that could no longer be provided by the emperors.” (214)
1122 Concordat of Worms resolved the investiture controversy
8) Christians, heretics, pagans, Muslims
8.1 Clean and Unclean
Heresy treated as unclean; heretics as violators on the way to hell – same as pagans; Catholics (right believers) should avoid these people; i.e. Either-or mentality – no salvation outside the Church ; paganism was devil-worship i.e. Not a neutral choice (Bede)
The filth of hell i.e. The impurity of non-Christians (Dante Hell Canto 6)
Pelagianism (Bede) and Arianism, and how the defeat of these strengthened the papacy; the papacy used its opposition to heretics as a tool for Church centralization
Bishops fight heretics (Bede)
8.2 Aggressive Proselytizing
Aggressive proselytizing (Bede)
Violent destruction of pagan altars, temples (Bede): Gregory of Tours fighting the pagans in late ancient Gaul as a template for later proselytizing
8.3 Fear of Paganism
Constant threat of falling back to idolatry / paganism (Bede)
Culture war against paganism: the Church promoted the division in society between Christians and pagans, which eventually marginalized the pagans (Bede)
8.4 Paganism and the Devil / Demons
The Cross overpowers the devil: belief in demons and the devil; evil is reified; the rejection of demons in becoming Christian; the blood of Christ saves us from the bonds of the devil (Pope Boniface) (Bede)
Aggressive view towards pre-Christian Europe: Greek gods and pagan gods become demons and denizens of hell – the old, pre-Christian world is therefore damned, except in its philosophy; yet even its philosophers cannot be saved since they didn't know God; i.e. Philosophy alone cannot save (Dante) Christendom was to be an all-encompassing community radically inclusive of everyone, where it called each person to responsibility for belief, and to duty before the Christian community; community was naturally, inherently Christian community, and pagans were increasingly sidelined and cast off of the community
8.5 The Crusades
When Pope Urban called for the crusade, Christendom obeyed with great, violent energy; exemplifies the place of the papacy in the medieval imagination / Christendom;
Penitential character of the crusades (First Things)
Expansion of Europe / Christendom
The Other / Enemy is defined outside of Europe as Muslims as it is inside with pagans and Jews -> an increasingly confident, self-assured, expansionist Christendom that had taken its first wobbly steps with Charlemagne in Spain (and the Song of Roland), i.e. The ruler who had with the pope laid the foundation of Europe / Christendom had also laid the foundation of the Crusades by exemplifying Christian military assertiveness against the Muslims, pushing back against Islam
The place of Islam in Christendom's imagination: a heretical religion with which one could never make peace, as exemplified by the savagery of the crusades (Maalouf); the sense that Christendom was on the defensive against the Muslims and had a duty to protect Christendom i.e. Siege mentality to Christendom which was encouraged by the papacy and the Church because it served to unite the West against the enemy at the fringes; the image of the militia christi, perhaps a holdover from Constantine and his victory at Milvian Bridge and a holdover from the warrior, Germanic culture of Northern Europe which had only recently fully converted to Roman Christianity; Christianity had yet failed to sublimate this warrior instinct, so could only channel it away from Europe itself; could there have been a Christendom without Islam? Christendom developed after Islam had developed, so the easy answer is that Islam was essential (La Chanson de Roland and the Reconquista gave a sense in the early medieval period of Christendom)
Richard Coeur de Lion and other heroes of the Crusades
Peter the Venerable and religious zealousness in the Crusades; the pogroms along the Rhineland as a prelude to the massacres in the Holy Land, culminating in the bloodbath in Jerusalem in 1099
Knights Templars: holiness fused with fighting a physical, human enemy rather than the demonic enemy of the Egyptian desert, as fought by the desert fathers
Increased trade with the Muslim world, and imported culture from the Muslim world
Saint Francis in Egypt: the other attempt to convert the Saracens
A sense that Christendom is the centre of the world and the centre of God's plan; that Christendom has the truth and a divine mission to the rest of the world (hence the Albigensian crusade and the religious wars in the Baltics
Christendom is Europe: European culture is Christian culture, and vice versa; to become a Christian demands that one be a European: hence the Crusaders' lack of respect for Christians in Anatolia and the Near East during the Crusades: they often alienated the Armenian, Syrian, Oriental, and Greek Christians; 1204 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople and stole art treasures, which they brought back to the “true” centre of Christendom, which was Rome and Italy; the forced unification and Romanization of the Greek Church at Constantinople, with a Latin patriarch; the Crusaders' failure to keep their promise and hand Antioch back to the Byzantine Emperor; the Crusades were to make the Holy Land as extension of Christendom/Europe/the Latin world, rather than a way to support the Byzantine emperor in his fight against the Turks i.e. The crusaders did not work with the Byzantine Emperor, but went as colonizers
“Le monde barnarisé sur lequel agit et dans lequel baigne l'Eglise du hait Moyen Age est un monde extraverti, tourné vers des tâches extérieurs, vers des proies ou des fins matérielles: la conquête, la nourriture, le pouvoir, le salut dans l'au-delà. C'est un monde, disons primitif, qui si définit par des attitudes, des conduites, des gestes. Les gens ne peuvent y être jugés que sur des actes, non sur des sentiments.” (Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, p. 169): (ME) and the crusades were the last great expression of this germanic extroversion/Christian warrior-ism, after which Christians and the Church increasingly turned inward and psychological, which promoted individualism and subjectivity. Christian warriors were after this confined to the romances and arthurian literature developed during and after the Crusades. Allegory also developed, as in Le Roman de la Rose and the Divine Comedy.
8.6 Heretics in the High Middle Ages
Heretics go to hell (Dante)
First part of Middle Ages: the Church is not strong enough to militarily confront heretics (Pelagians in Britain (Bede)) but they aggressively proselytize; Second part of Middle Ages: the Church is strong enough to call on men of arms to hunt down and eliminate heretical groups: Albigensians, Waldensians, Jan Hus, John Wycliff; the Inquisition;
Joachim of Fiora “was not alone by any means. There were many more heterodox and really heretical movements in the twelfth century, marked by rejection of some of the most important doctrines of the Church, the throwing off of all authority, and frank rebellion.” - including the Waldensians, the Albigensians, Arnold of Brescia (Merton p. 173, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) According to Merton, Joachim “was accepted, trusted and blessed by the popes.... He must not be loosely equated with the heretics. He was universally respected and approved by the Church, and his work was posthumously condemned only after his disciples had caused it to be interpreted in dangerous ways, and hotheads had in fact appealed to him to justify rebellion.”
Conclusion
(p. 156-7 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) Because of Pelagianism, Montanism and Manicheism (Tertullian) : “the background of Western spirituality we find {marked by} this uneasy division and anxiety on the question of grace and effort, along with tendencies to activism, to violent controversy ..., to pessimism, to a juridical and authoritarian outlook, and a pronounced anti-mystical current.”
Bibliography of Primary Works
Annales regni Francorum, Annales Fuldenses /Annales Vedastines
Annales Xantenses
Anselm
Augustine, De Civitate Dei
Bede, Historia
Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict
Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae
Bonaventure
Cantar de mio Cid
Carmina Burana
La Chanson de Roland
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier de la Charette
Parcival
da Varagine,Jacopo, Legenda Aurea, or Legenda Sanctorum.
Dante, De Monarchia
Divina Comedia
De Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum
de Joinville, Jean Vie de Saint Louis
Donatio Constantini
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni
Gesta Romanorum
Gratian, Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum
Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis
Life of Saint Benedict
Historia Brittonum
Historia Caroli Magni / Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle
Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe
Liber Pontificalis
Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform
Das Niebelungenlied
Otto von Freising, Gesta Friderici Imperatoris
Palatina, Bartolomeo, Lives of the Popes
Plotinus
Le Roman de la Rose
Sacrementaria Gregoriana
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Summa contra Gentiles
The Cloud of Unknowing
Bibliography of Secondary Works
Collins, Roger, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy. Basic Books. 2009.
Foley, Edward. From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minnesota: Order of Saint Benedict. 2008.
Le Goff, Jacques. Un Moyen Age en images. Paris: Editions Hazan. 2007.
Pour un autre Moyen Age. Gallimard. 2001.
Maalouf, Amin. Les Croisades vues par les Arabes: La Barbarie franque en terre sainte. Paris” J'ai Lu. 2007.
Merton, Thomas. An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3. Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 2008.
Mullins, Edwin. Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Jerusalem: City of Longing
By Simon Goldhill, 356 pages hardcover, Harvard University Press, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02866-1.
Incomparably rich historically, religiously, and culturally, Jerusalem functions most importantly as the centre of myth-making. The celestial Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of Mohammed's flight, David's city, the centre of the Arab-Israeli conflict: all reflect the city's deepest nature. No one book can contain all these images.
Cambridge Professor of Greek Simon Goldhill offers us the Jerusalem of the Western and, more specifically, British imagination, which is to say that he tries to be all-inclusive but doesn't even come close. Jerusalem: City of Longing tells us as much about Goldhill and the Western cultural perspective out of which he writes as it does about the city itself. This isn't such a bad thing for understanding the Western imagination or for taking in bits and pieces of the city itself, which has played such a large role in Western culture.
The author, as a Western skeptic, refuses to fall for the romantic Jerusalem of countless religious legends, half-truths, and downright lies about the place: “This is a city that fabricates, forgets, and forges its past ... through misinterpretations and politically motivated fictions.”
Perhaps such sober words come from Goldhill's own great knowledge about Jerusalem's facts and fictions, especially the Christian sites and history, and its mythologies. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre carries within it wide-ranging Christian history, from the Ethiopians to the Greeks, the Franciscans to the Armenians. These centuries-old conflicts seems on the edge of vanishing because of the extreme age of the monks and priests who do the daily fighting for space. Yet, the level of distrust, inflexibility, and even hate over the church's turf represent Jerusalem's never-ending politics of conflict.
At his best discussing the architectural and political ins and outs of buildings such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Goldhill describes how the various Christian communities have created different architectural styles. American Protestants could never understand or appreciate the resulting eccentric whole. He cites his own misgivings, noting “the clash between tawdriness and transcendence that each visitor has to negotiate” when in the church.
The Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, likewise symbolizes war, disunity, and centuries-old misunderstandings. Goldhill explains in great detail how, despite not being the actual remaining wall of the Temple, it has become the single holiest site for world Judaism, the heart of Jewish “national identity” even: “Once again, we need a basic history to appreciate what we are looking at – though as with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we will find that bitter disputes have a way of overtaking the story.”
King David wanted the Temple to be the great centralizing force for his kingdom, and this was indeed carried out: “One Torah, one Temple ... were the defining elements of Jewish national culture and identity” from the time of the ancient Israelites. Goldhill sets a few things straight. There were not two Temples, as people are fond of saying, but actually three. Jews often see the third one, built by Herod the Great, as merely an extension of the second, but Herod had to totally demolish the existing one. He needed to redesign Jerusalem's entire geography, including constructing a gigantic platform on which the new Temple would stand. A remaining part of this platform, rather than a piece of the Temple itself, the Western Wall had no religious significance in ancient times.
The Wall became a centre for Jewish prayer in the Middle Ages, because “it was as close to the forbidden Temple Mount as possible, and conveniently close to where the small rabbinical Jewish community lived.” As with so much in Jerusalem, fiction eventually becomes fact. The myth and resulting religious practices surrounding a given place or object remade the object into the real thing.
Part of this myth-making stems from the rivalries of the city's various groups: “The more interest the Jews took in the wall, the more the Muslims responded.” The fact that “the essence of Jewish identity” is now located in the Wall has as much to do with these struggles as with anything else. The myth-making gives rival claimants something tangible with which to stake their claims.
Again, Goldhill is at his best in connecting historical fiction with current political fact: “That a wall of a platform built by a self-aggrandizing tyrant could come to be seen as one of the holiest places of Judaism is a fine demonstration of how Jerusalem works.”
As with Christian and Islamic religious sites in the city, the Temple brings out the best and worst in believers, as it has inspired poetry and “spiritual reflections,” but also violence and “political extremism baffling and painful to liberals and outsiders. Archaeology here is constantly sucked into the storm. The archaeological exploration of Jerusalem's underground past has repeatedly ground to a halt in the face of the bitter Realpolitik of the street.”
Just as much as the Christian and Jewish shrines, history has scarred the al-Aqsa mosque. In Jerusalem, this violent atmosphere has continued to the present day, where “tense, religiously committed groups circulate through carefully framed memorials of political conflict, psychotic aggression, and an imagined past of peace, now lost.”
The imagination of the past and the present makes for the reality itself. None of the city's major religious groups is particularly rational when it comes to their daily living, let alone when it comes to the application of their beliefs.
Jerusalem: City of Longing's great descriptions of the various buildings bring out the deep-seated religious roots to conflict, as with the Dome of the Rock: “When the worshiper processes around the building, reading the inscriptions, he is also performing a polemic against Christianity and a defense of the faith of Islam. It is fully religious architecture.”
Goldhill himself engages in some fanciful myth-making, supposing that one possibility why Hebrew writings never mention the rock lying under the Dome of the Rock is because it was in the Holy of Holies: the Dome of the Rock houses the holiest point of ancient Israelite religion.
In other words, even a sober academic like Goldhill cannot resist Jerusalem's spiritual, myth-making charms.
Incomparably rich historically, religiously, and culturally, Jerusalem functions most importantly as the centre of myth-making. The celestial Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of Mohammed's flight, David's city, the centre of the Arab-Israeli conflict: all reflect the city's deepest nature. No one book can contain all these images.
Cambridge Professor of Greek Simon Goldhill offers us the Jerusalem of the Western and, more specifically, British imagination, which is to say that he tries to be all-inclusive but doesn't even come close. Jerusalem: City of Longing tells us as much about Goldhill and the Western cultural perspective out of which he writes as it does about the city itself. This isn't such a bad thing for understanding the Western imagination or for taking in bits and pieces of the city itself, which has played such a large role in Western culture.
The author, as a Western skeptic, refuses to fall for the romantic Jerusalem of countless religious legends, half-truths, and downright lies about the place: “This is a city that fabricates, forgets, and forges its past ... through misinterpretations and politically motivated fictions.”
Perhaps such sober words come from Goldhill's own great knowledge about Jerusalem's facts and fictions, especially the Christian sites and history, and its mythologies. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre carries within it wide-ranging Christian history, from the Ethiopians to the Greeks, the Franciscans to the Armenians. These centuries-old conflicts seems on the edge of vanishing because of the extreme age of the monks and priests who do the daily fighting for space. Yet, the level of distrust, inflexibility, and even hate over the church's turf represent Jerusalem's never-ending politics of conflict.
At his best discussing the architectural and political ins and outs of buildings such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Goldhill describes how the various Christian communities have created different architectural styles. American Protestants could never understand or appreciate the resulting eccentric whole. He cites his own misgivings, noting “the clash between tawdriness and transcendence that each visitor has to negotiate” when in the church.
The Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, likewise symbolizes war, disunity, and centuries-old misunderstandings. Goldhill explains in great detail how, despite not being the actual remaining wall of the Temple, it has become the single holiest site for world Judaism, the heart of Jewish “national identity” even: “Once again, we need a basic history to appreciate what we are looking at – though as with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we will find that bitter disputes have a way of overtaking the story.”
King David wanted the Temple to be the great centralizing force for his kingdom, and this was indeed carried out: “One Torah, one Temple ... were the defining elements of Jewish national culture and identity” from the time of the ancient Israelites. Goldhill sets a few things straight. There were not two Temples, as people are fond of saying, but actually three. Jews often see the third one, built by Herod the Great, as merely an extension of the second, but Herod had to totally demolish the existing one. He needed to redesign Jerusalem's entire geography, including constructing a gigantic platform on which the new Temple would stand. A remaining part of this platform, rather than a piece of the Temple itself, the Western Wall had no religious significance in ancient times.
The Wall became a centre for Jewish prayer in the Middle Ages, because “it was as close to the forbidden Temple Mount as possible, and conveniently close to where the small rabbinical Jewish community lived.” As with so much in Jerusalem, fiction eventually becomes fact. The myth and resulting religious practices surrounding a given place or object remade the object into the real thing.
Part of this myth-making stems from the rivalries of the city's various groups: “The more interest the Jews took in the wall, the more the Muslims responded.” The fact that “the essence of Jewish identity” is now located in the Wall has as much to do with these struggles as with anything else. The myth-making gives rival claimants something tangible with which to stake their claims.
Again, Goldhill is at his best in connecting historical fiction with current political fact: “That a wall of a platform built by a self-aggrandizing tyrant could come to be seen as one of the holiest places of Judaism is a fine demonstration of how Jerusalem works.”
As with Christian and Islamic religious sites in the city, the Temple brings out the best and worst in believers, as it has inspired poetry and “spiritual reflections,” but also violence and “political extremism baffling and painful to liberals and outsiders. Archaeology here is constantly sucked into the storm. The archaeological exploration of Jerusalem's underground past has repeatedly ground to a halt in the face of the bitter Realpolitik of the street.”
Just as much as the Christian and Jewish shrines, history has scarred the al-Aqsa mosque. In Jerusalem, this violent atmosphere has continued to the present day, where “tense, religiously committed groups circulate through carefully framed memorials of political conflict, psychotic aggression, and an imagined past of peace, now lost.”
The imagination of the past and the present makes for the reality itself. None of the city's major religious groups is particularly rational when it comes to their daily living, let alone when it comes to the application of their beliefs.
Jerusalem: City of Longing's great descriptions of the various buildings bring out the deep-seated religious roots to conflict, as with the Dome of the Rock: “When the worshiper processes around the building, reading the inscriptions, he is also performing a polemic against Christianity and a defense of the faith of Islam. It is fully religious architecture.”
Goldhill himself engages in some fanciful myth-making, supposing that one possibility why Hebrew writings never mention the rock lying under the Dome of the Rock is because it was in the Holy of Holies: the Dome of the Rock houses the holiest point of ancient Israelite religion.
In other words, even a sober academic like Goldhill cannot resist Jerusalem's spiritual, myth-making charms.
Christendom
By Brian Welter
Christendom was created and sustained by the papacy, and when the corruption of the papal court had become too entrenched through the centuries, Christendom broke up. Papal leadership made and sustained Christendom. Yet rather than total domination from Rome, this was done with great variety and diversity of outlook. Rather than faithfully following the papacy in every little detail, it was the shared broad vision of this world that Christendom took from the papacy. This happened even when the papacy or pope himself was unpopular.
1) Social and Cultural Generalities; Popular Belief; Saints
1.1 Medieval images of Christ
Christ as warrior: Christ descending to hell on Holy Saturday (Dante Hell Canto 4); Christ fighting the devil and paying a ransom (Anselm; Aquinas); Christ who fights evil; what kind of grace does this lead to? Masculine God of grace or feminized God of sentimental love?
Feminizing images of Christendom (being married to Christ; images of Christ as a nurturing mother); Bernard of Clairvaux; Hedewij and the female mystics; feminized, sentimental love
Mary: Her increasing place after 1000; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux; Mechtild of Magdeburg (Mary as goddess)
Bonaventure: “there is no separation between theology and mysticism in Albert [the Great] any more than in Bonaventure.” (Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism, p. 149); Bonaventure's mysticism i.e. Knowing Christ personally
Christology; soteriology, and their influences on popular belief
Christ and Muslims
1.2 Church Control
Church controlled marriage (Bede): As the Church gained more and more conversions, it was able to control family life. This gave Christianity power over people's most intimate lives, and also allowed for the Church to control the upbringing of children. Increased Church control of marriage resulted in infant baptisms becoming the norm, as Christian families were formed. Paganism was increasingly marginalized, as pagans could no longer turn to their families for support when the Church was changing other aspects of society.
“this identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature that distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history” - the Church was of the world, “appearing as a state alongside other states, with its own law courts, tax system, and bureaucracy.”(Foley 186-7)
The Church controlled the economy: was the final arbiter on which occupations were sinful and which were not – the Church's blessing of a profession meant that that profession could expand and take off; it had more prestige; medieval corporations under the tutelage of the Church, including have an official patron saint and religious duties, symbolized by the corporation's sponsorship of a window in a church (Le Goff); Usury a sin (Dante, Hell Canto 11)
1.3 Medieval Christian Imagination
“Sans avoir de centre dominant (Rome qui aurait pu et dû l'être était trop excentrique; Jérusalem fût, même au temps des croisades et du royaume latin de Terre sainte, un centre surtout symbolique; et l'Empire, après l'éphémère installation de Charlemagne à Aix-la-Chapelle, n'eut pas de capitale), la Chrétienté se constitua un territoire central.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 16) ; Le Goff: the peripheral areas were important, especially for evangelization: This was so because (I'm talking here) the papacy had given this vision for Christendom to follow
“Une des étranges caractéristiques de l'espace de l'Occident médiéval est d'avoir eu des centres idéologiques périphériques ou externes.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36)
12th C.: “la nostalgie de cette centralité [Rome] perdue mais conservée dans l'imaginaire.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36)
The medieval imagination, while demanding concrete manifestations of God through miracles and other works, also had a great capacity for the beyond, the non-physical. The medieval imagination was an imagination of absence as well as presence, where heaven or Jerusalem became the Platonic ideals for this world. With no internal centre, Christendom looked to a spiritual centre, whose physical location was Jerusalem and whose real, spiritual location was heaven. This life was therefore ephemeral, a journey, to something much more substantial.
2) The Bible
The Bible was the greatest source of the medieval imagination.
2.1 Bible as Reference
The Bible and life in reference to it; King Ethelfrith is compared to Saul (Bede)
2.2 Eschatology and the Book of Revelation
Eschatological sense to the Middle Ages (Bede): Medieval Christians waited for the coming of Christ. They were a Pentecostal people; signs of the end were everywhere
Joachim of Fiore
Augustinian eschatology
Dante
(Read http://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/20/Religiologiques20PDF/20(087-111)Boglioni.pdf) (http://www.colbud.hu/main_old/PubArchive/PL/PL20-Vauchez.pdf)
Various prophets of the apocalypse (Hildegard of Bingen (?))
Love of the Bible (Bede)
2.3 The Vulgate
Helps to centralize the Church under Rome and to ensure that all of Christendom is Latin – makes Latin the unifying language of Christendom; one of the most important commonalities; the Vulgate Bible was the primary reference point for Christendom and the creation of the medieval imagination, as it provided for the common language
In the exclusive hands of the clergy, helped promote the clerical-lay division of Christendom i.e. The clerical nature of Christendom (the clerics were the protectors and promoters of Christendom, as well as among the chief beneficiaries)
2.4 Illuminated Manuscripts; the Bible and Art (Cathedral Sculpture)
3) Saints
3.1 Early Medieval Saints and Bishops: Power over Nature
Early medieval saints and bishops: Power over nature; connection between the physical world and the spiritual-Christian world (Bede)
Miracles: Sight to the blind (Bede): Christianity replaced paganism as the way to improve one's lot in this world as well. Believers' lives improved in the here and now; i.e. The material benefits of Christianity, and how it reorganized society
A miracle solved the issue (Bede): Miracles were also sources of power for saints and for the Church. Through miracles people believed. God became tangible through miracles.
Relics and totemism (Bede): Relics, as with miracle-producing preachers and saints, were conduits of the divine. People expected them to produce miracles, and used them as a focus for their prayers. Instead of going to the doctor or a hospital, people placed their hopes for cures in relics. Relics were therefore a source of great hope and joy, and were central to medieval Christendom. In a way, they had a eucharistic or sacramental function. As the Church moved peasant Christians further and further away from the Eucharist, the people practiced popular devotions.
Power of God shown everywhere; always looking for signs, since there was division between faith/God and nature; nature was a second revelation (Bede) God's power was real in this world, and was not, at least in the early Middle Ages, seen in psychological terms. The inner disposition of the person was not as important as the outward signs. An analogy between the created world and the reality of God was taken for granted.
3.2 Ideals of Conversion and Sainthood
The ideal behavior of a saint and saintly conversion, which included tears; prophecy of the saint; visions; messages from heaven; oracles (Bede): Conversion bestowed on a person the power of the Holy Spirit. In the saints, this power manifested itself in a particularly strong, visible way, through spiritual and physical power. These signs were a requirement for being a saint. Sainthood was not a psychological category, but a category of power, especially healing power.
3.3 Saint Francis of Assisi as the Second Christ
Francis' response to clerical corruption, heretics (Waldensians), and the new bourgeois money economy
The institutionalization and watering-down of the Franciscan ideal: the split in the order (the Spirituals); St. Bonaventure and his spirituality and leadership of the Franciscans
The friars bring contemplation to the urban areas throughout Europe, whereas the monastics had been rural fixtures
The friars at the University of Paris
4) Spirituality and Theology 1: Sin and Damnation
4.1 Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's Confessions as the paradigm of personal reflection and psychology of faith, struggle, and ultimate conversion
Merton p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “The Augustinian theology, inseparable from the drama of Augustine's own conversion and of his whole life, comes to give all the spirituality of the West a special character of its own.” ... “this overwhelming influence of Augustine.” especially in the Cistercians, the Franciscans (esp after Bonaventure)
4.1 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life
Theology begins to speak more and more to the inner lives of people rather than to the outer, legalistic and behavioral aspects; the sacraments are only one aspect of this, since most people do not have regular access to these; those who do have regular access are also turning inwards; individualization of spirituality - the sinner is alone before God and he/she rather than the community answers for sin; structural or communal sin is not a priority; Dante's hell is primarily a place of the individual; communities are not damned; individuals are, so there is a pre-eminence of the individual soul and a basic equality of humans even with the great hierarchical society of the MA
Avarice, which even touches the Church and its cardinal and other clerics (Dante, Hell 7)
Psychology of anger (Dante Hell 7; 9)
Despair, sin; virtue (Dante)
Humility: bishops discussing whether to follow Aug's tradition, will only if he shows he is humble (Bede)
Dante's psychological and sociological analysis of sin (Dante Hell 11)
The psychology behind the sin of fraud (Dante Hell 11)
Deepening self-analysis / self-psychology and sense of one's own thoughts (Dante Hell 13)
4.2 Hell and Damnation
Church teaching: People scared of hell; the church policy was to deliberately scare people; belief in original sin; heavy guilt, which even virtues don't get rid of (Bede)
Augustine's Original Sin; sexuality (Confessions)
Final judgement (Dante Hell 6)
God's justice is fearful: the damned cannot escape their unrepented sins (Dante Hell 12)
The sense that life is short and eternal life is long (Dante Hell 12)
4.3 Defilement of the Natural World
Spirituality: The defilement of the secular world, and the love for the contemplative life, even by those (clerics) who serve secular church or government interests (Bede)
5) Spirituality and Theology 2: The Church's Teachings
5.1 The Monastic Life
The high esteem for monks and the monastic life; the rejection of worldly living for monastic spirituality i.e. The superiority of monastic spirituality over lay spirituality (Bede): “the sole hope of salvation, of remission of an individual's sins, lay with the prayers of the monks... in this frightened and unstable world.” (Mullins 8)
St. Benedict and his rule; Cluniac reform; the Cistercians: theology, their support for the papacy instead of the local bishop aided the centralization of Christendom under the papacy and prevented any ecclesiastical rivals to the pope from developing in the West: aside from a Council no one could hope to rival the papacy;
how monastic theological and spiritual writings influenced Christendom, including the papacy itself
development of Latin church culture i.e. Church culture was not primarily a vernacular culture, though mystery plays and popular devotions developed in parallel to ecclesiastical Latin
development of book culture and how monasteries were the great publishing houses of Europe, and through this they came to influence the papacy itself, as in Gaul's monasteries' writings on liturgy (Germanization of the Eucharist)
Monasteries at the heart of Christendom, including spiritual, theological, but also social and economic: “it was the monasteries that held a vital key in the shaping of a new Europe. They acted as colleges, patrons of art and architecture, moral guardians, benevolent landlords, founders of social services, centers of capital wealth, as well as being institutions of vast political influence on an international scale, with the ear of kings, emperors, and popes.” (Mullins, p. 7)
The Rule of Benedict and the salvatory role of labor” work as penitence – work was bad because it was divine punishment for original sin, but the monks gave labor prestige because they gave penitence and humility prestige (Le Goff)
How monks drained swamps and built up agriculture i.e. Citeaux the swamp became the source of the Cistercians, who went to the forested fringes of Europe and worked what hitherto had been unworkable land (Cluny, Cistercians)
5.2 The Sacraments: The Eucharist
Germanization of the Eucharist: e.g. “vessels were not only forged of precious metals, they underwent a special rite of blessing or consecration.” (Foley 177)
Transubstantiation (Aquinas; 4th Lateran Council); The Blood of Jesus; Eucharistic devotions; the body that suffers ->suffering
Theology of the Eucharist
Increasing division between the clergy and the laity -> the laity are not close to the Eucharist and can't even see it; strict hierarchy (Foley)
“a sustained emphasis on the unworthiness of the laity.... Unworthy people did not go to communion regularly, and offertory processions were eliminated in many places.” (Foley 167)
Increasing liturgical confusion: “Popular devotion focused on seeing the host rather than receiving it: (Foley 194); indulgences, Masses for the dead
The 8th sacrament: Knighthood (La Chanson de Roland; Percival ou la Quete du Grail; )
Ordination in Germanic Europe: “multiple rites that invested the priest with new powers, including the ability to move things from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred, and effectively moved him from one realm to the other as well.” (Foley 177)
5.3 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life; Mysticism
Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Merton notes after quoting from it: “Here love and prayer are contrasted with study, which is incapable of bringing us to union. Note however that St. Bonaventure certainly stresses the unity of the intellectual and spiritual lives as much as anyone ever did.” (An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.,p. 152)
Virtue is interpreted psychologically (Dante)
5.4 Purgatory and Suffering
Purgatory (Dante)
Christian life as a journey; go deeper, i.e. There are no shortcuts in the spiritual life (Dante); Bonaventure and the inward journey
“La forêt devient le desert chrétien avec ses tentations, ses dangers, mais fût aussi le le lieu d'un accès privilégié à Dieu.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Image, p. 41)
5.5 Faith and Reason
The reasonableness of faith (Dante Hell Canto 11)
Aquinas and Aristotle -> the need to Christianize Aristotle before he can be accepted within Christendom i.e. Separation of philosophy and theology, but theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, which means that theology wtill has the last word on the limits of philosophy;
the scholastics and the University of Paris; Abelard's new teaching style, which was an aggressive, confrontational style that shook theology and gave no comfortable answers, but challenged authority and the tradition instead: philosophy no longer guards tradition and theology, but challenges it and questions everything; it is all right to question things
Abelard versus Bernard of Clairvaux: the separation of theology from liturgy and from prayer/contemplation, as theology becomes a university subject, objectified as something to be studied and analyzed rather than as the life-giving source of the community; theology becomes the domain of experts who fragment theology into its various disciplines
Anselm and the use of philosophy to prove God's existence
The Dominicans (and the University of Paris and the papacy) as guardians of orthodoxy: theology (such as regarding the Eucharist or ecclesiology (Gratian's Decretals)) becomes much more defined and precise; theology becomes a science and moves further and further away from the liturgy and prayer / contemplation (including the monasteries) as its centre becomes the university, with philosophy becoming increasingly independent of theology (unlike Islam?) and an increasing threat to the Summas of the time
The great theological summas as another counter to the heretical
The natural law; and how nature follows the mind of God (Dante Hell Canto 11); Aquinas' analogy from nature; natural law as an example of how philosophy supports
theology
“scholastic theology was becoming more and more a speculative science and less and less a wisdom, even though the great theologians kept stressing the sapiential aspect of it.” ... “with the great love for scholastic thought there was developed a kind of contempt for patristic and strictly religious wisdom, and for contemplation as such.” (152 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.)s
5.6 Late Medieval Lay Piety
Tauler, Eckhart, the Beguines, Hadewijch; the Brethren of the Common Life; the Theologia Mystica; the Rhineland Mystics: 14th C. msytics: “under the influence of the school of Cologne etc. where Albert the Great taught, were strongly Dominican and Dionysian, with an intellectual stress, even a speculative character, that prevented their Dionysian trend from becoming exclusively affective and anti-intellectual. Normally, we find that the mystics of darkness of the Rhenish and English schools are strongly Thomistic.” (p. 153 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism); The Cloud of Unknowing (Dionysian according to Merton); Merton: 155: “The Dominicans begin to break away from the dominance of Augustine and it is in the Rhenish mystics, largely under Dominican infuence or actually Dominicans themselves, that we see Dionysius preponderant over Augustine.”
(p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “Bridal mysticism {is} affective, cataphatic, erotic, a mysticism of desire and espousal, {with} a stress on the faculties of the soul, especially the will; {it is} generally Augustinian {and} tends to be anti-intellectual.”
Increasing individualism (Le Goff)
Pilgrimage: The Book of Margery Kemp, and how she was harassed, accused of Lollardry by the bishops as she went on her pilgrimage
6) Ecclesiastical Affairs
6.1 The role of the papacy
Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries (and encouraged them when they wanted to give up), including Augustine, to Britain; other pope's corresponded with missionaries in England and with Christian English royalty (Pope Bonifatius); the authority of the papacy, and its concern for orthodoxy (Bede)
Investiture
6.2 Latin (Roman) Church Culture
Sending Aug to Britain also meant sending Roman/Latin Church culture northwards (Bede)
Conflicts between Irish/British Christians and Rome over (especially) the date of Easter: the drive towards uniformity and conformity; the papacy laying claim to very certain bounds , where this policy creates a coherent Western civilization: the papacy creates a unified civilization with the same givens (Bede)
The papacy represented the continuity of ancient Rome, which Charlemagne also found important, though when his dynasty never took root the Roman inheritance fell back again onto the papacy
6.3 Clear Church Teaching and Leadership
Church teaching: clear theology e.g. Gregory the Great sees a clear difference between the Old and New Testaments (the New supersedes the Old) (Bede)
6.4 Clerical Corruption and Anti-clericalism
Corrupt papacy – loss of prestige and ability to lead: resulting fragmentation of Christendom
Rich clergy (Dante Hell 7) – early medieval bishops helped protect the people against dragons, serpents, and other natural disasters, as well as representing continuity with the Roman empire in their diocese since they often represented the only capable administration; by the high MA the bishops had become corrupt and distant from the people, no longer pastoring them
Papal reforms especially 11th C.
Increasing curial power; the development of the cardinals
Albigensians and the Albigensian Crusade: the attempt by people, including the laity, to create a pure church separate from the old corrupt one led to the fragmentation of Christendom, which the papacy tried to heal not by reforming the Church and itself but by calling the Albigensian crusade
scandal: Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales' portrayal of lewd churchmen
7) Politics
7.1 War and Christianity
Bishops as military leaders; war and troops sanctified by priests i.e. Separation between religious and political powers didn't mean that the religious and the political didn't play a role in each other's spheres; close relationship between Christianity and war: Christian kings fought wars (Bede)
Christian spiritual power had military applications i.e. Faith and military prowess (Bede)
Heaven is against the enemy (Bede)
Faithfulness and thankfulness of the troops (Bede)
7.2 Conversion through Rulers
Pope Gregory aimed to convert secular leaders because they could convert their subjects and create a Christian society; mass baptisms of leaders, nobles, and the people (Bede)
Worldly power is blessed by God: a kind of divine-right of kings ideology e.g. The Church forces a pagan king to convert so that he can marry a Christian woman (echoes of Das Nibelungenlied) (Bede)
King Edwin, and not the papacy or other agents of the Church, set up the bishopric of York (Bede)
The Christian rulers then guaranteed the continued operation of Christendom by backing the church, though rulers often did fight with the papacy; Thomas a Kempis and how this sometimes didn't work yet how the system itself did continue
7.3 Papacy and Empire
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: 754: Pope Stephen II (752-757) annointed Pepin III “king with holy oil at Reims in 754” -> “reflected the new ruler's need for spiritual underpinning of his authority.” (p. 151) ; Charlemagne and the papacy (pope helped renew the Carolingian church); “Within a short time this monopoly of crowning, anointing and investing with a sword gave the papacy considerable leverage in the choice of a new emperor.” (p. 151); by the 10th C.” “deeply entrenched acceptance of papal authority in Western Christendom.” Widespread belief “that the pope and his synod had the right to impose the discipline of the canon law on lay rulers ... meant that in the longer term a king had to come to terms with the papacy.”; French reforming monasteries promoted papal power over that of French bishops (193)
7.4 Investiture
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: Leo IX (1049-1054) and Hildebrand (Gregory VII 1073-85) wanted to recover the Church's “freedom from lay domination” -> “part of a wider move to enhance the status of the clergy over the laity” and to increase the separation between the 2 orders, “the clerical and the lay” (203); 1077 Canossa: the papacy was trying to become a universal institution: “The transformation in the nature of the papacy in this period reflects wider changes taking place in Western Europe. The ideal of a common Christian society of shared beliefs and culture needed an institutional structure that could no longer be provided by the emperors.” (214)
1122 Concordat of Worms resolved the investiture controversy
8) Christians, heretics, pagans, Muslims
8.1 Clean and Unclean
Heresy treated as unclean; heretics as violators on the way to hell – same as pagans; Catholics (right believers) should avoid these people; i.e. Either-or mentality – no salvation outside the Church ; paganism was devil-worship i.e. Not a neutral choice (Bede)
The filth of hell i.e. The impurity of non-Christians (Dante Hell Canto 6)
Pelagianism (Bede) and Arianism, and how the defeat of these strengthened the papacy; the papacy used its opposition to heretics as a tool for Church centralization
Bishops fight heretics (Bede)
8.2 Aggressive Proselytizing
Aggressive proselytizing (Bede)
Violent destruction of pagan altars, temples (Bede): Gregory of Tours fighting the pagans in late ancient Gaul as a template for later proselytizing
8.3 Fear of Paganism
Constant threat of falling back to idolatry / paganism (Bede)
Culture war against paganism: the Church promoted the division in society between Christians and pagans, which eventually marginalized the pagans (Bede)
8.4 Paganism and the Devil / Demons
The Cross overpowers the devil: belief in demons and the devil; evil is reified; the rejection of demons in becoming Christian; the blood of Christ saves us from the bonds of the devil (Pope Boniface) (Bede)
Aggressive view towards pre-Christian Europe: Greek gods and pagan gods become demons and denizens of hell – the old, pre-Christian world is therefore damned, except in its philosophy; yet even its philosophers cannot be saved since they didn't know God; i.e. Philosophy alone cannot save (Dante)
8.5 The Crusades
When Pope Urban called for the crusade, Christendom obeyed with great, violent energy; exemplifies the place of the papacy in the medieval imagination / Christendom
Expansion of Europe / Christendom
The Other / Enemy is defined outside of Europe as Muslims as it is inside with pagans and Jews -> an increasingly confident, self-assured, expansionist Christendom that had taken its first wobbly steps with Charlemagne in Spain (and the Song of Roland), i.e. The ruler who had with the pope laid the foundation of Europe / Christendom had also laid the foundation of the Crusades by exemplifying Christian military assertiveness against the Muslims, pushing back against Islam
The place of Islam in Christendom's imagination: a heretical religion with which one could never make peace, as exemplified by the savagery of the crusades (Maalouf); the sense that Christendom was on the defensive against the Muslims and had a duty to protect Christendom i.e. Siege mentality to Christendom which was encouraged by the papacy and the Church because it served to unite the West against the enemy at the fringes; the image of the militia christi, perhaps a holdover from Constantine and his victory at Milvian Bridge and a holdover from the warrior, Germanic culture of Northern Europe which had only recently fully converted to Roman Christianity; Christianity had yet failed to sublimate this warrior instinct, so could only channel it away from Europe itself; could there have been a Christendom without Islam? Christendom developed after Islam had developed, so the easy answer is that Islam was essential (La Chanson de Roland and the Reconquista gave a sense in the early medieval period of Christendom)
Richard Coeur de Lion and other heroes of the Crusades
Peter the Venerable and religious zealousness in the Crusades; the pogroms along the Rhineland as a prelude to the massacres in the Holy Land, culminating in the bloodbath in Jerusalem in 1099
Knights Templars: holiness fused with fighting a physical, human enemy rather than the demonic enemy of the Egyptian desert, as fought by the desert fathers
Increased trade with the Muslim world, and imported culture from the Muslim world
Saint Francis in Egypt: the other attempt to convert the Saracins
A sense that Christendom is the centre of the world and the centre of God's plan; that Christendom has the truth and a divine mission to the rest of the world (hence the Albigensian crusade and the religious wars in the Baltics
Christendom is Europe: European culture is Christian culture, and vice versa; to become a Christian demands that one be a European: hence the Crusaders' lack of respect for Christians in Anatolia and the Near East during the Crusades: they often alienated the Armenian, Syrian, Oriental, and Greek Christians; 1204 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople and stole art treasures, which they brought back to the “true” centre of Christendom, which was Rome and Italy; the forced unification and Romanization of the Greek Church at Constantinople, with a Latin patriarch; the Crusaders' failure to keep their promise and hand Antioch back to the Byzantine Emperor; the Crusades were to make the Holy Land as extension of Christendom/Europe/the Latin world, rather than a way to support the Byzantine emperor in his fight against the Turks i.e. The crusaders did not work with the Byzantine Emperor, but went as colonizers
“Le monde barnarisé sur lequel agit et dans lequel baigne l'Eglise du hait Moyen Age est un monde extraverti, tourné vers des tâches extérieurs, vers des proies ou des fins matérielles: la conquête, la nourriture, le pouvoir, le salut dans l'au-delà. C'est un monde, disons primitif, qui si définit par des attitudes, des conduites, des gestes. Les gens ne peuvent y être jugés que sur des actes, non sur des sentiments.” (Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, p. 169): (ME) and the crusades were the last great expression of this germanic extroversion/Christian warrior-ism, after which Christians and the Church increasingly turned inward and psychological, which promoted individualism and subjectivity. Christian warriors were after this confined to the romances and arthurian literature developed during and after the Crusades. Allegory also developed, as in Le Roman de la Rose and the Divine Comedy.
8.6 Heretics in the High Middle Ages
Heretics go to hell (Dante)
First part of Middle Ages: the Church is not strong enough to militarily confront heretics (Pelagians in Britain (Bede)) but they aggressively proselytize; Second part of Middle Ages: the Church is strong enough to call on men of arms to hunt down and eliminate heretical groups: Albigensians, Waldensians, Jan Hus, John Wycliff; the Inquisition;
Conclusion
(p. 156-7 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) Because of Pelagianism, Montanism and Manicheism (Tertullian) : “the background of Western spirituality we find {marked by} this uneasy division and anxiety on the question of grace and effort, along with tendencies to activism, to violent controversy ..., to pessimism, to a juridical and authoritarian outlook, and a pronounced anti-mystical current.”
Bibliography of Primary Works
Annales regni Francorum, Annales Fuldenses /Annales Vedastines
Annales Xantenses
Anselm
Augustine, De Civitate Dei
Bede, Historia
Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict
Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae
Cantar de mio Cid
Carmina Burana
La Chanson de Roland
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier de la Charette
Parcival
da Varagine,Jacopo, Legenda Aurea, or Legenda Sanctorum.
Dante, De Monarchia
Divina Comedia
De Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum
de Joinville, Jean Vie de Saint Louis
Donatio Constantini
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni
Gesta Romanorum
Gratian, Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum
Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis
Life of Saint Benedict
Historia Brittonum
Historia Caroli Magni / Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle
Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe
Liber Pontificalis
Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform
Das Niebelungenlied
Otto von Freising, Gesta Friderici Imperatoris
Palatina, Bartolomeo, Lives of the Popes
Plotinus
Le Roman de la Rose
Sacrementaria Gregoriana
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Summa contra Gentiles
The Cloud of Unknowing
Bibliography of Secondary Works
Collins, Roger, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy. Basic Books. 2009.
Foley, Edward. From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minnesota: Order of Saint Benedict. 2008.
Le Goff, Jacques. Un Moyen Age en images. Paris: Editions Hazan. 2007.
Pour un autre Moyen Age. Gallimard. 2001.
Maalouf, Amin. Les Croisades vues par les Arabes: La Barbarie franque en terre sainte. Paris” J'ai Lu. 2007.
Merton, Thomas. An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3. Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 2008.
Mullins, Edwin. Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire.
Christendom was created and sustained by the papacy, and when the corruption of the papal court had become too entrenched through the centuries, Christendom broke up. Papal leadership made and sustained Christendom. Yet rather than total domination from Rome, this was done with great variety and diversity of outlook. Rather than faithfully following the papacy in every little detail, it was the shared broad vision of this world that Christendom took from the papacy. This happened even when the papacy or pope himself was unpopular.
1) Social and Cultural Generalities; Popular Belief; Saints
1.1 Medieval images of Christ
Christ as warrior: Christ descending to hell on Holy Saturday (Dante Hell Canto 4); Christ fighting the devil and paying a ransom (Anselm; Aquinas); Christ who fights evil; what kind of grace does this lead to? Masculine God of grace or feminized God of sentimental love?
Feminizing images of Christendom (being married to Christ; images of Christ as a nurturing mother); Bernard of Clairvaux; Hedewij and the female mystics; feminized, sentimental love
Mary: Her increasing place after 1000; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux; Mechtild of Magdeburg (Mary as goddess)
Bonaventure: “there is no separation between theology and mysticism in Albert [the Great] any more than in Bonaventure.” (Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism, p. 149); Bonaventure's mysticism i.e. Knowing Christ personally
Christology; soteriology, and their influences on popular belief
Christ and Muslims
1.2 Church Control
Church controlled marriage (Bede): As the Church gained more and more conversions, it was able to control family life. This gave Christianity power over people's most intimate lives, and also allowed for the Church to control the upbringing of children. Increased Church control of marriage resulted in infant baptisms becoming the norm, as Christian families were formed. Paganism was increasingly marginalized, as pagans could no longer turn to their families for support when the Church was changing other aspects of society.
“this identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature that distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history” - the Church was of the world, “appearing as a state alongside other states, with its own law courts, tax system, and bureaucracy.”(Foley 186-7)
The Church controlled the economy: was the final arbiter on which occupations were sinful and which were not – the Church's blessing of a profession meant that that profession could expand and take off; it had more prestige; medieval corporations under the tutelage of the Church, including have an official patron saint and religious duties, symbolized by the corporation's sponsorship of a window in a church (Le Goff); Usury a sin (Dante, Hell Canto 11)
1.3 Medieval Christian Imagination
“Sans avoir de centre dominant (Rome qui aurait pu et dû l'être était trop excentrique; Jérusalem fût, même au temps des croisades et du royaume latin de Terre sainte, un centre surtout symbolique; et l'Empire, après l'éphémère installation de Charlemagne à Aix-la-Chapelle, n'eut pas de capitale), la Chrétienté se constitua un territoire central.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 16) ; Le Goff: the peripheral areas were important, especially for evangelization: This was so because (I'm talking here) the papacy had given this vision for Christendom to follow
“Une des étranges caractéristiques de l'espace de l'Occident médiéval est d'avoir eu des centres idéologiques périphériques ou externes.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36)
12th C.: “la nostalgie de cette centralité [Rome] perdue mais conservée dans l'imaginaire.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Images, p. 36)
The medieval imagination, while demanding concrete manifestations of God through miracles and other works, also had a great capacity for the beyond, the non-physical. The medieval imagination was an imagination of absence as well as presence, where heaven or Jerusalem became the Platonic ideals for this world. With no internal centre, Christendom looked to a spiritual centre, whose physical location was Jerusalem and whose real, spiritual location was heaven. This life was therefore ephemeral, a journey, to something much more substantial.
2) The Bible
The Bible was the greatest source of the medieval imagination.
2.1 Bible as Reference
The Bible and life in reference to it; King Ethelfrith is compared to Saul (Bede)
2.2 Eschatology and the Book of Revelation
Eschatological sense to the Middle Ages (Bede): Medieval Christians waited for the coming of Christ. They were a Pentecostal people; signs of the end were everywhere
Joachim of Fiore
Augustinian eschatology
Dante
(Read http://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/20/Religiologiques20PDF/20(087-111)Boglioni.pdf) (http://www.colbud.hu/main_old/PubArchive/PL/PL20-Vauchez.pdf)
Various prophets of the apocalypse (Hildegard of Bingen (?))
Love of the Bible (Bede)
2.3 The Vulgate
Helps to centralize the Church under Rome and to ensure that all of Christendom is Latin – makes Latin the unifying language of Christendom; one of the most important commonalities; the Vulgate Bible was the primary reference point for Christendom and the creation of the medieval imagination, as it provided for the common language
In the exclusive hands of the clergy, helped promote the clerical-lay division of Christendom i.e. The clerical nature of Christendom (the clerics were the protectors and promoters of Christendom, as well as among the chief beneficiaries)
2.4 Illuminated Manuscripts; the Bible and Art (Cathedral Sculpture)
3) Saints
3.1 Early Medieval Saints and Bishops: Power over Nature
Early medieval saints and bishops: Power over nature; connection between the physical world and the spiritual-Christian world (Bede)
Miracles: Sight to the blind (Bede): Christianity replaced paganism as the way to improve one's lot in this world as well. Believers' lives improved in the here and now; i.e. The material benefits of Christianity, and how it reorganized society
A miracle solved the issue (Bede): Miracles were also sources of power for saints and for the Church. Through miracles people believed. God became tangible through miracles.
Relics and totemism (Bede): Relics, as with miracle-producing preachers and saints, were conduits of the divine. People expected them to produce miracles, and used them as a focus for their prayers. Instead of going to the doctor or a hospital, people placed their hopes for cures in relics. Relics were therefore a source of great hope and joy, and were central to medieval Christendom. In a way, they had a eucharistic or sacramental function. As the Church moved peasant Christians further and further away from the Eucharist, the people practiced popular devotions.
Power of God shown everywhere; always looking for signs, since there was division between faith/God and nature; nature was a second revelation (Bede) God's power was real in this world, and was not, at least in the early Middle Ages, seen in psychological terms. The inner disposition of the person was not as important as the outward signs. An analogy between the created world and the reality of God was taken for granted.
3.2 Ideals of Conversion and Sainthood
The ideal behavior of a saint and saintly conversion, which included tears; prophecy of the saint; visions; messages from heaven; oracles (Bede): Conversion bestowed on a person the power of the Holy Spirit. In the saints, this power manifested itself in a particularly strong, visible way, through spiritual and physical power. These signs were a requirement for being a saint. Sainthood was not a psychological category, but a category of power, especially healing power.
3.3 Saint Francis of Assisi as the Second Christ
Francis' response to clerical corruption, heretics (Waldensians), and the new bourgeois money economy
The institutionalization and watering-down of the Franciscan ideal: the split in the order (the Spirituals); St. Bonaventure and his spirituality and leadership of the Franciscans
The friars bring contemplation to the urban areas throughout Europe, whereas the monastics had been rural fixtures
The friars at the University of Paris
4) Spirituality and Theology 1: Sin and Damnation
4.1 Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's Confessions as the paradigm of personal reflection and psychology of faith, struggle, and ultimate conversion
Merton p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “The Augustinian theology, inseparable from the drama of Augustine's own conversion and of his whole life, comes to give all the spirituality of the West a special character of its own.” ... “this overwhelming influence of Augustine.” especially in the Cistercians, the Franciscans (esp after Bonaventure)
4.1 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life
Theology begins to speak more and more to the inner lives of people rather than to the outer, legalistic and behavioral aspects; the sacraments are only one aspect of this, since most people do not have regular access to these; those who do have regular access are also turning inwards; individualization of spirituality - the sinner is alone before God and he/she rather than the community answers for sin; structural or communal sin is not a priority; Dante's hell is primarily a place of the individual; communities are not damned; individuals are, so there is a pre-eminence of the individual soul and a basic equality of humans even with the great hierarchical society of the MA
Avarice, which even touches the Church and its cardinal and other clerics (Dante, Hell 7)
Psychology of anger (Dante Hell 7; 9)
Despair, sin; virtue (Dante)
Humility: bishops discussing whether to follow Aug's tradition, will only if he shows he is humble (Bede)
Dante's psychological and sociological analysis of sin (Dante Hell 11)
The psychology behind the sin of fraud (Dante Hell 11)
Deepening self-analysis / self-psychology and sense of one's own thoughts (Dante Hell 13)
4.2 Hell and Damnation
Church teaching: People scared of hell; the church policy was to deliberately scare people; belief in original sin; heavy guilt, which even virtues don't get rid of (Bede)
Augustine's Original Sin; sexuality (Confessions)
Final judgement (Dante Hell 6)
God's justice is fearful: the damned cannot escape their unrepented sins (Dante Hell 12)
The sense that life is short and eternal life is long (Dante Hell 12)
4.3 Defilement of the Natural World
Spirituality: The defilement of the secular world, and the love for the contemplative life, even by those (clerics) who serve secular church or government interests (Bede)
5) Spirituality and Theology 2: The Church's Teachings
5.1 The Monastic Life
The high esteem for monks and the monastic life; the rejection of worldly living for monastic spirituality i.e. The superiority of monastic spirituality over lay spirituality (Bede): “the sole hope of salvation, of remission of an individual's sins, lay with the prayers of the monks... in this frightened and unstable world.” (Mullins 8)
St. Benedict and his rule; Cluniac reform; the Cistercians: theology, their support for the papacy instead of the local bishop aided the centralization of Christendom under the papacy and prevented any ecclesiastical rivals to the pope from developing in the West: aside from a Council no one could hope to rival the papacy;
how monastic theological and spiritual writings influenced Christendom, including the papacy itself
development of Latin church culture i.e. Church culture was not primarily a vernacular culture, though mystery plays and popular devotions developed in parallel to ecclesiastical Latin
development of book culture and how monasteries were the great publishing houses of Europe, and through this they came to influence the papacy itself, as in Gaul's monasteries' writings on liturgy (Germanization of the Eucharist)
Monasteries at the heart of Christendom, including spiritual, theological, but also social and economic: “it was the monasteries that held a vital key in the shaping of a new Europe. They acted as colleges, patrons of art and architecture, moral guardians, benevolent landlords, founders of social services, centers of capital wealth, as well as being institutions of vast political influence on an international scale, with the ear of kings, emperors, and popes.” (Mullins, p. 7)
The Rule of Benedict and the salvatory role of labor” work as penitence – work was bad because it was divine punishment for original sin, but the monks gave labor prestige because they gave penitence and humility prestige (Le Goff)
How monks drained swamps and built up agriculture i.e. Citeaux the swamp became the source of the Cistercians, who went to the forested fringes of Europe and worked what hitherto had been unworkable land (Cluny, Cistercians)
5.2 The Sacraments: The Eucharist
Germanization of the Eucharist: e.g. “vessels were not only forged of precious metals, they underwent a special rite of blessing or consecration.” (Foley 177)
Transubstantiation (Aquinas; 4th Lateran Council); The Blood of Jesus; Eucharistic devotions; the body that suffers ->suffering
Theology of the Eucharist
Increasing division between the clergy and the laity -> the laity are not close to the Eucharist and can't even see it; strict hierarchy (Foley)
“a sustained emphasis on the unworthiness of the laity.... Unworthy people did not go to communion regularly, and offertory processions were eliminated in many places.” (Foley 167)
Increasing liturgical confusion: “Popular devotion focused on seeing the host rather than receiving it: (Foley 194); indulgences, Masses for the dead
The 8th sacrament: Knighthood (La Chanson de Roland; Percival ou la Quete du Grail; )
Ordination in Germanic Europe: “multiple rites that invested the priest with new powers, including the ability to move things from the realm of the profane to that of the sacred, and effectively moved him from one realm to the other as well.” (Foley 177)
5.3 The Interior Life: Growing Psychology of the Spiritual Life; Mysticism
Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Merton notes after quoting from it: “Here love and prayer are contrasted with study, which is incapable of bringing us to union. Note however that St. Bonaventure certainly stresses the unity of the intellectual and spiritual lives as much as anyone ever did.” (An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.,p. 152)
Virtue is interpreted psychologically (Dante)
5.4 Purgatory and Suffering
Purgatory (Dante)
Christian life as a journey; go deeper, i.e. There are no shortcuts in the spiritual life (Dante); Bonaventure and the inward journey
“La forêt devient le desert chrétien avec ses tentations, ses dangers, mais fût aussi le le lieu d'un accès privilégié à Dieu.” (Le Goff; Un Moyen Age en Image, p. 41)
5.5 Faith and Reason
The reasonableness of faith (Dante Hell Canto 11)
Aquinas and Aristotle -> the need to Christianize Aristotle before he can be accepted within Christendom i.e. Separation of philosophy and theology, but theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, which means that theology wtill has the last word on the limits of philosophy;
the scholastics and the University of Paris; Abelard's new teaching style, which was an aggressive, confrontational style that shook theology and gave no comfortable answers, but challenged authority and the tradition instead: philosophy no longer guards tradition and theology, but challenges it and questions everything; it is all right to question things
Abelard versus Bernard of Clairvaux: the separation of theology from liturgy and from prayer/contemplation, as theology becomes a university subject, objectified as something to be studied and analyzed rather than as the life-giving source of the community; theology becomes the domain of experts who fragment theology into its various disciplines
Anselm and the use of philosophy to prove God's existence
The Dominicans (and the University of Paris and the papacy) as guardians of orthodoxy: theology (such as regarding the Eucharist or ecclesiology (Gratian's Decretals)) becomes much more defined and precise; theology becomes a science and moves further and further away from the liturgy and prayer / contemplation (including the monasteries) as its centre becomes the university, with philosophy becoming increasingly independent of theology (unlike Islam?) and an increasing threat to the Summas of the time
The great theological summas as another counter to the heretical
The natural law; and how nature follows the mind of God (Dante Hell Canto 11); Aquinas' analogy from nature; natural law as an example of how philosophy supports
theology
“scholastic theology was becoming more and more a speculative science and less and less a wisdom, even though the great theologians kept stressing the sapiential aspect of it.” ... “with the great love for scholastic thought there was developed a kind of contempt for patristic and strictly religious wisdom, and for contemplation as such.” (152 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3.)s
5.6 Late Medieval Lay Piety
Tauler, Eckhart, the Beguines, Hadewijch; the Brethren of the Common Life; the Theologia Mystica; the Rhineland Mystics: 14th C. msytics: “under the influence of the school of Cologne etc. where Albert the Great taught, were strongly Dominican and Dionysian, with an intellectual stress, even a speculative character, that prevented their Dionysian trend from becoming exclusively affective and anti-intellectual. Normally, we find that the mystics of darkness of the Rhenish and English schools are strongly Thomistic.” (p. 153 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism); The Cloud of Unknowing (Dionysian according to Merton); Merton: 155: “The Dominicans begin to break away from the dominance of Augustine and it is in the Rhenish mystics, largely under Dominican infuence or actually Dominicans themselves, that we see Dionysius preponderant over Augustine.”
(p. 155 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism “Bridal mysticism {is} affective, cataphatic, erotic, a mysticism of desire and espousal, {with} a stress on the faculties of the soul, especially the will; {it is} generally Augustinian {and} tends to be anti-intellectual.”
Increasing individualism (Le Goff)
Pilgrimage: The Book of Margery Kemp, and how she was harassed, accused of Lollardry by the bishops as she went on her pilgrimage
6) Ecclesiastical Affairs
6.1 The role of the papacy
Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries (and encouraged them when they wanted to give up), including Augustine, to Britain; other pope's corresponded with missionaries in England and with Christian English royalty (Pope Bonifatius); the authority of the papacy, and its concern for orthodoxy (Bede)
Investiture
6.2 Latin (Roman) Church Culture
Sending Aug to Britain also meant sending Roman/Latin Church culture northwards (Bede)
Conflicts between Irish/British Christians and Rome over (especially) the date of Easter: the drive towards uniformity and conformity; the papacy laying claim to very certain bounds , where this policy creates a coherent Western civilization: the papacy creates a unified civilization with the same givens (Bede)
The papacy represented the continuity of ancient Rome, which Charlemagne also found important, though when his dynasty never took root the Roman inheritance fell back again onto the papacy
6.3 Clear Church Teaching and Leadership
Church teaching: clear theology e.g. Gregory the Great sees a clear difference between the Old and New Testaments (the New supersedes the Old) (Bede)
6.4 Clerical Corruption and Anti-clericalism
Corrupt papacy – loss of prestige and ability to lead: resulting fragmentation of Christendom
Rich clergy (Dante Hell 7) – early medieval bishops helped protect the people against dragons, serpents, and other natural disasters, as well as representing continuity with the Roman empire in their diocese since they often represented the only capable administration; by the high MA the bishops had become corrupt and distant from the people, no longer pastoring them
Papal reforms especially 11th C.
Increasing curial power; the development of the cardinals
Albigensians and the Albigensian Crusade: the attempt by people, including the laity, to create a pure church separate from the old corrupt one led to the fragmentation of Christendom, which the papacy tried to heal not by reforming the Church and itself but by calling the Albigensian crusade
scandal: Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales' portrayal of lewd churchmen
7) Politics
7.1 War and Christianity
Bishops as military leaders; war and troops sanctified by priests i.e. Separation between religious and political powers didn't mean that the religious and the political didn't play a role in each other's spheres; close relationship between Christianity and war: Christian kings fought wars (Bede)
Christian spiritual power had military applications i.e. Faith and military prowess (Bede)
Heaven is against the enemy (Bede)
Faithfulness and thankfulness of the troops (Bede)
7.2 Conversion through Rulers
Pope Gregory aimed to convert secular leaders because they could convert their subjects and create a Christian society; mass baptisms of leaders, nobles, and the people (Bede)
Worldly power is blessed by God: a kind of divine-right of kings ideology e.g. The Church forces a pagan king to convert so that he can marry a Christian woman (echoes of Das Nibelungenlied) (Bede)
King Edwin, and not the papacy or other agents of the Church, set up the bishopric of York (Bede)
The Christian rulers then guaranteed the continued operation of Christendom by backing the church, though rulers often did fight with the papacy; Thomas a Kempis and how this sometimes didn't work yet how the system itself did continue
7.3 Papacy and Empire
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: 754: Pope Stephen II (752-757) annointed Pepin III “king with holy oil at Reims in 754” -> “reflected the new ruler's need for spiritual underpinning of his authority.” (p. 151) ; Charlemagne and the papacy (pope helped renew the Carolingian church); “Within a short time this monopoly of crowning, anointing and investing with a sword gave the papacy considerable leverage in the choice of a new emperor.” (p. 151); by the 10th C.” “deeply entrenched acceptance of papal authority in Western Christendom.” Widespread belief “that the pope and his synod had the right to impose the discipline of the canon law on lay rulers ... meant that in the longer term a king had to come to terms with the papacy.”; French reforming monasteries promoted papal power over that of French bishops (193)
7.4 Investiture
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: Leo IX (1049-1054) and Hildebrand (Gregory VII 1073-85) wanted to recover the Church's “freedom from lay domination” -> “part of a wider move to enhance the status of the clergy over the laity” and to increase the separation between the 2 orders, “the clerical and the lay” (203); 1077 Canossa: the papacy was trying to become a universal institution: “The transformation in the nature of the papacy in this period reflects wider changes taking place in Western Europe. The ideal of a common Christian society of shared beliefs and culture needed an institutional structure that could no longer be provided by the emperors.” (214)
1122 Concordat of Worms resolved the investiture controversy
8) Christians, heretics, pagans, Muslims
8.1 Clean and Unclean
Heresy treated as unclean; heretics as violators on the way to hell – same as pagans; Catholics (right believers) should avoid these people; i.e. Either-or mentality – no salvation outside the Church ; paganism was devil-worship i.e. Not a neutral choice (Bede)
The filth of hell i.e. The impurity of non-Christians (Dante Hell Canto 6)
Pelagianism (Bede) and Arianism, and how the defeat of these strengthened the papacy; the papacy used its opposition to heretics as a tool for Church centralization
Bishops fight heretics (Bede)
8.2 Aggressive Proselytizing
Aggressive proselytizing (Bede)
Violent destruction of pagan altars, temples (Bede): Gregory of Tours fighting the pagans in late ancient Gaul as a template for later proselytizing
8.3 Fear of Paganism
Constant threat of falling back to idolatry / paganism (Bede)
Culture war against paganism: the Church promoted the division in society between Christians and pagans, which eventually marginalized the pagans (Bede)
8.4 Paganism and the Devil / Demons
The Cross overpowers the devil: belief in demons and the devil; evil is reified; the rejection of demons in becoming Christian; the blood of Christ saves us from the bonds of the devil (Pope Boniface) (Bede)
Aggressive view towards pre-Christian Europe: Greek gods and pagan gods become demons and denizens of hell – the old, pre-Christian world is therefore damned, except in its philosophy; yet even its philosophers cannot be saved since they didn't know God; i.e. Philosophy alone cannot save (Dante)
8.5 The Crusades
When Pope Urban called for the crusade, Christendom obeyed with great, violent energy; exemplifies the place of the papacy in the medieval imagination / Christendom
Expansion of Europe / Christendom
The Other / Enemy is defined outside of Europe as Muslims as it is inside with pagans and Jews -> an increasingly confident, self-assured, expansionist Christendom that had taken its first wobbly steps with Charlemagne in Spain (and the Song of Roland), i.e. The ruler who had with the pope laid the foundation of Europe / Christendom had also laid the foundation of the Crusades by exemplifying Christian military assertiveness against the Muslims, pushing back against Islam
The place of Islam in Christendom's imagination: a heretical religion with which one could never make peace, as exemplified by the savagery of the crusades (Maalouf); the sense that Christendom was on the defensive against the Muslims and had a duty to protect Christendom i.e. Siege mentality to Christendom which was encouraged by the papacy and the Church because it served to unite the West against the enemy at the fringes; the image of the militia christi, perhaps a holdover from Constantine and his victory at Milvian Bridge and a holdover from the warrior, Germanic culture of Northern Europe which had only recently fully converted to Roman Christianity; Christianity had yet failed to sublimate this warrior instinct, so could only channel it away from Europe itself; could there have been a Christendom without Islam? Christendom developed after Islam had developed, so the easy answer is that Islam was essential (La Chanson de Roland and the Reconquista gave a sense in the early medieval period of Christendom)
Richard Coeur de Lion and other heroes of the Crusades
Peter the Venerable and religious zealousness in the Crusades; the pogroms along the Rhineland as a prelude to the massacres in the Holy Land, culminating in the bloodbath in Jerusalem in 1099
Knights Templars: holiness fused with fighting a physical, human enemy rather than the demonic enemy of the Egyptian desert, as fought by the desert fathers
Increased trade with the Muslim world, and imported culture from the Muslim world
Saint Francis in Egypt: the other attempt to convert the Saracins
A sense that Christendom is the centre of the world and the centre of God's plan; that Christendom has the truth and a divine mission to the rest of the world (hence the Albigensian crusade and the religious wars in the Baltics
Christendom is Europe: European culture is Christian culture, and vice versa; to become a Christian demands that one be a European: hence the Crusaders' lack of respect for Christians in Anatolia and the Near East during the Crusades: they often alienated the Armenian, Syrian, Oriental, and Greek Christians; 1204 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople and stole art treasures, which they brought back to the “true” centre of Christendom, which was Rome and Italy; the forced unification and Romanization of the Greek Church at Constantinople, with a Latin patriarch; the Crusaders' failure to keep their promise and hand Antioch back to the Byzantine Emperor; the Crusades were to make the Holy Land as extension of Christendom/Europe/the Latin world, rather than a way to support the Byzantine emperor in his fight against the Turks i.e. The crusaders did not work with the Byzantine Emperor, but went as colonizers
“Le monde barnarisé sur lequel agit et dans lequel baigne l'Eglise du hait Moyen Age est un monde extraverti, tourné vers des tâches extérieurs, vers des proies ou des fins matérielles: la conquête, la nourriture, le pouvoir, le salut dans l'au-delà. C'est un monde, disons primitif, qui si définit par des attitudes, des conduites, des gestes. Les gens ne peuvent y être jugés que sur des actes, non sur des sentiments.” (Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, p. 169): (ME) and the crusades were the last great expression of this germanic extroversion/Christian warrior-ism, after which Christians and the Church increasingly turned inward and psychological, which promoted individualism and subjectivity. Christian warriors were after this confined to the romances and arthurian literature developed during and after the Crusades. Allegory also developed, as in Le Roman de la Rose and the Divine Comedy.
8.6 Heretics in the High Middle Ages
Heretics go to hell (Dante)
First part of Middle Ages: the Church is not strong enough to militarily confront heretics (Pelagians in Britain (Bede)) but they aggressively proselytize; Second part of Middle Ages: the Church is strong enough to call on men of arms to hunt down and eliminate heretical groups: Albigensians, Waldensians, Jan Hus, John Wycliff; the Inquisition;
Conclusion
(p. 156-7 Merton, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism) Because of Pelagianism, Montanism and Manicheism (Tertullian) : “the background of Western spirituality we find {marked by} this uneasy division and anxiety on the question of grace and effort, along with tendencies to activism, to violent controversy ..., to pessimism, to a juridical and authoritarian outlook, and a pronounced anti-mystical current.”
Bibliography of Primary Works
Annales regni Francorum, Annales Fuldenses /Annales Vedastines
Annales Xantenses
Anselm
Augustine, De Civitate Dei
Bede, Historia
Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict
Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae
Cantar de mio Cid
Carmina Burana
La Chanson de Roland
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier de la Charette
Parcival
da Varagine,Jacopo, Legenda Aurea, or Legenda Sanctorum.
Dante, De Monarchia
Divina Comedia
De Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum
de Joinville, Jean Vie de Saint Louis
Donatio Constantini
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni
Gesta Romanorum
Gratian, Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum
Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis
Life of Saint Benedict
Historia Brittonum
Historia Caroli Magni / Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle
Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe
Liber Pontificalis
Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform
Das Niebelungenlied
Otto von Freising, Gesta Friderici Imperatoris
Palatina, Bartolomeo, Lives of the Popes
Plotinus
Le Roman de la Rose
Sacrementaria Gregoriana
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Summa contra Gentiles
The Cloud of Unknowing
Bibliography of Secondary Works
Collins, Roger, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy. Basic Books. 2009.
Foley, Edward. From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minnesota: Order of Saint Benedict. 2008.
Le Goff, Jacques. Un Moyen Age en images. Paris: Editions Hazan. 2007.
Pour un autre Moyen Age. Gallimard. 2001.
Maalouf, Amin. Les Croisades vues par les Arabes: La Barbarie franque en terre sainte. Paris” J'ai Lu. 2007.
Merton, Thomas. An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 3. Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 2008.
Mullins, Edwin. Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire.
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