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.