The Roots of Medieval Christianity, Part II:
Christianization and the Barbarian West
"In the midst of the unsteady flow of time, the man of God knows how to keep steady the steps of his mind." |
From the vantage point of Rome in the sixth century, the world must have seemed like it was shattering. Armies of Germanic soldiers from beyond the old borders of the empire, now often with their families in tow, poured into Italy, Gaul, Hispania, and Britannia. Crops failed year after year, the people starved, the cities shrunk, unoccupied buildings fell into ruin, the economy
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endured long-term decline, plagues ravaged the land, the roads were unsafe, and an emperor had not sat in Rome for generations. A barbarian king was overlord of Italy, cowing what remained of the old Senate into submission. Even the Church seemed to have passed its glory days of the late fourth and early fifth century: the basilicas were emptier than they used to be, the coffers emptier, and the bishops understandably wary of the ever-shifting political situation.
Some voices from the period register downright alarm. The British cleric Gildas (d. ca. 570), in tones almost shrill, renounced the warlords who had carved the Roman province of Britain into petty kingdoms. Others, like Anicius
Some voices from the period register downright alarm. The British cleric Gildas (d. ca. 570), in tones almost shrill, renounced the warlords who had carved the Roman province of Britain into petty kingdoms. Others, like Anicius
Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. 524), an accomplished philosopher of old Roman stock who found himself on the wrong side of the Ostrogothic king of Italy, expressed a more detached sense of resignation. In the serenely beautiful book that he wrote in prison awaiting his execution, The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius argued that all the troubles of this world are transitory and that one should instead adopt the tranquillity that comes with contemplation of eternal truths. (The book remained a perennial favorite, and has been translated into English by no less than King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I.) Perhaps more heroically, Bishop Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) reacted to the sixth-century collapse through charitable outreach. He not only fed and defended the poor of his city, often selling church finery to do so, but he forged relations with the the Visigothic kings (who were Arian heretics) and with the Frankish chieftains (who were then still pagans), not only preaching what he saw as the true faith but also ransoming hostages that the barbarians had taken in war. And Caesarius offered his hospitality to all, rich or poor, Christian or pagan, Catholic or Arian. Caesarius' open, local, and pragmatic approach underscores the fact
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that Catholic Christian institutions in this period no longer represented a pervasive or hegemonic force, and and they no longer could rely, as they had in the fourth and fifth centuries, on the structures of state power to persuade non-believers.
But if many Christian institutions were struggling, a new type of more vibrant Christian community was emerging: monasticism. The earliest Christian monastics, the Desert Fathers and Mothers of fourth-century Egypt, had been mostly hermits. But the early Middle Ages saw an increasing interest in cenobitic monasticism, that is, in monks or nuns living, working, and praying together in an ordered community. Doubtless much of the appeal for this lifestyle arose from widespread societal instabilities; monasticism provided a stable and stationary ground for those seeking a more spiritually intense life. Some stabs at communal Christian living had been made in the West already: Augustine had drawn up a loose "rule" for such a life, as had Caesarius of Arles, Columbanus, and others. But, from the perspective of later centuries, the key founder of western monasticism was Benedict of Nursia (d. 543 CE), who, inspired by the descriptions of Eastern monastic practices by the well-traveled monk John Cassian, devised a new form of ordered spiritual life. His famous Rule (now usually known
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as The Rule of Saint Benedict) recommended a life for "penitents" and revolved around prayer, work, study, obedience, and detachment from the world. The Benedictine orders and its various offshoots (like the Cluniacs and the Cistercians) would exert an extraordinary influence on intellectual and spiritual life throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.
The language of the life of prayer in the monasteries was Latin, and in a very real sense the monasteries became places where Latinate Roman culture continued relatively unabated. It is doubtless due to the work of monastic scribes that most of the learning of the ancient world—both pagan and Christian—was transmitted to later ages. Beyond the monastery walls, Europe of the sixth and seventh centuries was linguistically, politically, and religiously diverse, and Christianity was really thriving only in the declining cities, where some Roman institutions still lingered on. And yet, slowly, Catholic Christianity slowly spread from the cities and monasteries and began to effect the conversion of non-urban populations. The gradual conversion of the peoples of Western Europe did in fact take hundreds of years: the Franks, Irish, Picts, Burgundians, Visigoths and Ostrogoths converted in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries; the Lombards and Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century; the Frisians, Saxons, Slovenes, and Bohemians in the eighth and ninth centuries; Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and Prussia and Lithuania not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nor was the process of conversion completely linear: the Ummayad conquest of Spain in the eighth century dispossessed and displaced the Christian Visigoths there. The Muslim governors in the Iberian peninsula were generally tolerant of both Christians and Jews, and even when the Franks under Charlemagne were able to win back significant territories in northern Spain, Christians and Muslims coexisted there—sometimes in an uneasy peace and sometimes in open war—throughout the Middle Ages.
Despite images from popular culture, the forced conversion of defeated peoples in medieval Europe was quite rare, at least on any large scale (and at least until the more vicious moments of the Spanish Reconquista in the fifteenth century); the scholar Alcuin famously persuaded Charlemagne to drop his policy of treating pagan practices a capital offense. In the core areas of the old Western Empire during the early Middle Ages, Christianity diffused from the cities and monasteries of Italy, Gaul, and Hispania to the courts of elite pagans and thence to the countryside. In other areas—Ireland, England, Frisia, Saxony—the initial stages of conversion came through the work of charismatic missionaries (Patrick in Ireland, Willibrord in Frisia, Boniface in Saxony, etc.). An oft-overlooked figure in this regard was Ecgberht of Ripon (d. 729 CE), a Northumbrian monk who, after the death by plague of all his monastic brothers, set out as a sort of "perpetual pilgrim" and traveled the European countryside, preaching and winning converts far and wide.
At other times, more systematic efforts were made to convert specific areas. Pope Gregory the Great, for example, commissioned the initial conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in 597 CE, supposedly after seeing Anglian captives at a slave-market in Rome. The so-called Bonifacian mission to the continental Saxons (named for its leader, St Boniface) was likewise well-organized and deliberate. In general, conversion happened from the top down: missionaries would naturally seek to convince kings, chieftains, and other elites, who would in turn exert their influence over their lower-status subjects and followers. There is also mounting evidence that high-status women played a significant role in the transmission of the new faith. For instance, the conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, was at least partially inspired by the Christian upbringing of his queen, the Burgundian princess Clothilde; and the prominence of women as abbesses and saints in the earliest generations after Christianization (Radegund, Hilda of Whitby, Genevieve of Paris, Odile of Alsace, Bridget of Kildare, etc.) likewise suggests their important role in the spreading and sustaining of the new faith.
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Perhaps the smoothest transition to Christianity in Western Europe occurred in Iceland. There, in the year 1000 CE, the Althing—the democratic assembly that governed the island—chose Christianity over Nordic paganism. Judging by the matter-of-factness with which the event is recorded in so many of the surviving sagas, the process of conversion seems to have caused little turbulence in Icelandic culture; many of the old pagan priests simply stepped into roles as Christian priests. However, the process of Christianization was rarely so clearly linear or so decisively complete. From the Church's perspective, the challenge of conversion in the early Middle Ages involved the transfer of the awe and affection that pagans felt toward their gods—and toward the practices, narratives, and worldviews built around these gods—and orienting these within a Christian frameworks. According to the historian Bede (d. 735 CE), the pagan King Edwin of Northumbria, was convinced by the following the "pitch" for Christianity, made by one of his counsellors:
"Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly through in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it." — Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, pp. 129-130 |
Edwin's counsellor's argument is that the Christian faith offers consolation against the transitoriness and uncertainty of life in ways that the Germanic pagan religion perhaps did not. Indeed, along with a sense of spiritual comfort, Christianity could provide a full worldview in which such consolation made sense: it accounted for the existence of suffering in the world (sin/the Fall), it presented a grand remedy for suffering (redemption through Christ), and it provided many other spiritual and material benefits. It is not known whether it was by the counsellor's vivid metaphor or by the influence of his Christian wife Æthelburh of Kent that King Edwin agreed to convert to Christianity. Perhaps tellingly, Edwin's successors returned to their ancestral pagan faith, and it would be a few more generations before Christianity made much headway in the north of England.
the continental Saxons, allegedly cut down the ancient and enormous sacred tree known as Donar's Oak, using its timber to build Christian churches; Charlemagne, in his campaign against the Saxons, apparently felled a similar sacred tree, Irminsul, in 772 CE. And although the Old English poem Beowulf does not directly narrate the process of Christianization, its depiction of the pagan Danes as worshiping vain and empty idols is of a piece with broader Christian attitudes of this period.
Another tactic used by the early medieval Church in its program of conversion was to reframe and reclassify the gods of the various Celtic and Germanic religions—after all, the Christian God could not appear to be sharing power with Danu, Lir, Lugus, Woden, Freya, or Thorr. The simplest way of doing this was to identify the pagan deities as the demons of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible itself provided a solid authority for this maneuver, as the Old Testament viewed practically all non-Hebrews as worshipers of the demon Baal and the New Testament supplied some vivid examples of the active presence of demons in the workaday world. In some cases, this demonization certainly worked: fear of demonic forces can be a powerful way of assuring more orthodox behavior. At the same time, demonization is too often a crude tool and does not take account of the real affection and devotion many pagans felt toward their gods. And so at other places and times in early medieval Europe, one also finds euhemerization, that is, the transformation of pagan deities into ancestor figures. Woden/Odin in particular seems to have been placed at the roots of many an Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian royal genealogy, and there are similar half-divine figures at the heads of Welsh and Irish genealogies. Similarly, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241 CE) in his Prose Edda conceives Odin as a historical hero and his home of Asgard as a real geographical locale in Asia Minor, and in his Heimskringla he identifies a euhemerized Frey as the ancestor of the Yngling dynasty.
Another tactic used by the early medieval Church in its program of conversion was to reframe and reclassify the gods of the various Celtic and Germanic religions—after all, the Christian God could not appear to be sharing power with Danu, Lir, Lugus, Woden, Freya, or Thorr. The simplest way of doing this was to identify the pagan deities as the demons of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible itself provided a solid authority for this maneuver, as the Old Testament viewed practically all non-Hebrews as worshipers of the demon Baal and the New Testament supplied some vivid examples of the active presence of demons in the workaday world. In some cases, this demonization certainly worked: fear of demonic forces can be a powerful way of assuring more orthodox behavior. At the same time, demonization is too often a crude tool and does not take account of the real affection and devotion many pagans felt toward their gods. And so at other places and times in early medieval Europe, one also finds euhemerization, that is, the transformation of pagan deities into ancestor figures. Woden/Odin in particular seems to have been placed at the roots of many an Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian royal genealogy, and there are similar half-divine figures at the heads of Welsh and Irish genealogies. Similarly, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241 CE) in his Prose Edda conceives Odin as a historical hero and his home of Asgard as a real geographical locale in Asia Minor, and in his Heimskringla he identifies a euhemerized Frey as the ancestor of the Yngling dynasty.
The early Irish fell upon a somewhat different way of integrating pagan and Christian cultures, retaining their old gods as a sort of semi-divine race of magical sages known as the Tuatha De Danann ("the people of the goddess Danu"), who now lived beneath Ireland's hills and who, though generally kindly, would also sometimes meddle unhelpfully in human affairs. The Irish were likewise well aware that some of their most famous heroes—Cú Chulainn, Oisín, etc.—were pagans, and, rather than demonize these figures, they devised narratives that brought them within the Christian orbit. The tale Siabur-Charpat Con Culaind ("The Phantom Chariot of Cú Chulainn") narrates how St Patrick summons the famous hero from Hell in order to help convert the High King of Ireland to the new faith; in return for his assistance, Cú Chulainn is made welcome in heaven. A later text, the twelfth-century Acallam na Senórach ("Tales of the Elders of Ireland") highlights St Patrick's interest in the pagan heroes, and the story shows him traveling the land in search of tales of their exploits; he eventually converts the ancient Fenian warriors Oisín and Caoílte, who have somehow survived to an superhuman old age, long enough to see the advent of the Christian era in Ireland.
Early medieval Ireland was perhaps unique in the extent of its easy integration of the pagan and Christian worlds. Elsewhere, however, other types of accommodation between Christianity and the older paganisms were worked out. Pope Gregory the Great is famous for having recommended that missionaries try to adapt pagan practices as much as possible within Christian frameworks (while always maintaining orthodoxy, of course) rather than destroying them outright. Churches might be built on the site of old pagan groves, holy wells made of sacred springs, etc. Occasionally, as with Bridget of Kildare, a pagan deity (here the Irish sovereignty goddess Brid) could be conceived anew as a Christian saint. In a similar vein, the early Church also sought—quite consciously, as Valerie Flint has so convincingly argued—to accommodate many of the "magical" practices of the old pagan Europeans. In some cases, pagan magic could be easily adapted into a Christian framework: healing by folk magic could give way to healing by monks or nuns; fields and livestock could be blessed by Christian priests rather than pagan priests; and seeking knowledge of the future by sortilege or haruspicy could be replaced by consulting a random page of the Bible under the proper conditions (after prayers, upon an altar, on a holy day, etc.). The early medieval Church seems to have been particularly enthusiastic about reviving Greco-Roman astrological knowledge to counter other sorts of pagan prognostication.
Charlemagne, from a tenth century manuscript. He is here depicted wearing an imperial crown, an emblem of the alliance between the papacy and the kingdom of the Franks. Although Charlemagne's kingdom did not long outlive his grandchildren, it laid the foundations for the Holy Roman Empire, which dominated the European political stage until the nineteenth century.
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Even as Christianity slowly filtered through the rural populaces of western Europe, the main centers of Christian presence throughout the countryside remained the monasteries. And although the monastic rule generally produced a fairly stable lifestyle, there was still considerable movement across the lands of the Latin West. Monks from Spain, Italy, and even Asia Minor could be found in English monasteries, Welsh monks in Gaul, English monks throughout Germany, and Irish monks (especially) at the abbeys of Sankt Gall (Switzerland), Reichenau (Germany), Bobbio (Italy), and practically everywhere else. This cross-fertilization helped to some extent to homogenize Latin Christian culture, and it assured a certain uniformity in the range of classical and patristic texts that were available, although regional differences also persisted. Perhaps the most conscious consolidation of Latin learning in the early Middle Ages came under the reign of Charlemagne, who gathered scholarly monks from across Europe to his Palace School in Aachen. The English monk Alcuin of York (d. 804 CE) was perhaps most responsible for the revival of learning sometimes known as the "Carolingian Renaissance," but other writers and thinkers sponsored by Charlemagne and his successors included Paul the Deacon, Hrabanus Maurus, Einhard, Walafrid Strabo, and John Scotus Eriugena.
The political dominance of the Frankish Carolingian dynasty over what is now France, Germany, and Italy in the eighth and ninth centuries was a sign of the |
emergent strength of the Latin West, but it was perhaps at the same time also a symptom of the isolation of western Europe from the rest of the world. The Carolingians—originally the family who served as palace majordomos to the Merovingian kings of Gaul—rose to prominence with Charles Martel (d. 741 CE), who led the Franks in battle against the forces of the Ummayad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours in 732 CE, thus stemming the tide of Islamic advance into Western Europe. It was Charles Martel's son Pippin who, disposing of the last figurehead king of the Merovingian dynasty (the hapless Childeric III), ascended to the Frankish throne in his own right. Pippin's son was the wise and able Charlemagne ("Charles the Great") who made his mark in his youth expanding the areas of Frankish power east into what is now Germany and south into northern Italy and northern Spain. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne as "Emperor of the Romans" on 25 December 800 CE was both an unmistakable act of political defiance against the Byzantine Emperor seated at Constantinople and also a very canny yoking of the ecclesiastical authority of a weakened papacy with the dominant military power of Europe.
The loose union of the Western Church with the Frankish state was not unfruitful, and the political stability and flourishing of learning that occurred under Charlemagne and his successors lasted for generations, setting the agenda for much of the statecraft and intellectual pursuits of Western Europe for centuries. However, the abiding hostility between the Frankish kingdoms and Ummayad Spain meant that intercourse between the two polities dwindled to a minimum, and this would cut the Christian West off from many of the cultural advances (in medicine, navigation, astronomy, mathematics, etc.) cultivated throughout the Islamicate world. On the eastern front, the pope's elevation of Charlemagne to the status of Emperor generated tensions that would come to a climax in 1054 CE with the permanent schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, between Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism. Western Europe by the tenth century may have consolidated itself into what we now might think of as Latin Christendom, but it was a unity purchased only at the expense of remaining peripheral to the real centers of wealth, sophistication, and intellectual prowess, which were to be found far beyond its boundaries: in Córdoba and Marrakesh, in Constantinople, in Cairo and Baghdad.
The loose union of the Western Church with the Frankish state was not unfruitful, and the political stability and flourishing of learning that occurred under Charlemagne and his successors lasted for generations, setting the agenda for much of the statecraft and intellectual pursuits of Western Europe for centuries. However, the abiding hostility between the Frankish kingdoms and Ummayad Spain meant that intercourse between the two polities dwindled to a minimum, and this would cut the Christian West off from many of the cultural advances (in medicine, navigation, astronomy, mathematics, etc.) cultivated throughout the Islamicate world. On the eastern front, the pope's elevation of Charlemagne to the status of Emperor generated tensions that would come to a climax in 1054 CE with the permanent schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, between Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism. Western Europe by the tenth century may have consolidated itself into what we now might think of as Latin Christendom, but it was a unity purchased only at the expense of remaining peripheral to the real centers of wealth, sophistication, and intellectual prowess, which were to be found far beyond its boundaries: in Córdoba and Marrakesh, in Constantinople, in Cairo and Baghdad.
Further Reading
- Samir Amin, Eurocentrism , 2nd ed. (Monthly Review Press, 2010)
- Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Books, 1991)
- Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Bruce L. Venarde, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2011)
- Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (W. W. Norton, 2000)
- John Carey, A Single Ray of the Sun: Religious Speculation in Early Ireland (Celtic Studies Publications, 1999)
- Cassiodorus, Institutes of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, trans. James W. Halporn and Mark Vessey (Liverpool University Press, 2004)
- Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (Yale University Press, 2004)
- William Diebold, Word and Image: The Art of the Early Middle Ages, 600-1050 (Routledge, 2000)
- Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 1991)
- Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Documents, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Arthurian Period Sources 7 (Phillimore, 1978)
- Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Books, 1974)
- Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton University Press, 1989)
- William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
- R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
- Ingrid Rembold, Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772-888 (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- Laury Sarty, "Frankish Romanness and Charlemagne's Empire," Speculum 91 (2016): 1040-1058.
- Roger Stalley, Early Medieval Architecture, Oxford History of Art (Oxford University Press, 1999)
- Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (Everyman's Library, 1995)
- C. H. Talbot, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, rev. ed. (Sheed & Ward Ltd, 1981)
- Tales of the Elders of Ireland, trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- André Vauchez, The Spirituality of the Medieval West: The Eighth to the Twelfth Century, trans. Collette Friedlander (Cistercian Publications, 1993)