The Christian Church in the Middle Ages: Monasticism and Order

THE POWER OF THE CHURCH

Study Guide questions:

1. What was the “Byzantine Empire”?
2. What filled the void left by the fall of the Roman Empire? How?
3. What kind of lifestyle would allow you to make it to Heaven?
4. What type of powers did the Church have?
5. Who was the main Christian theoretician of the EarlyChurch?
6. How could a Pope assert his political power against a King or a lord?

Byzantium and the fall of Rome

In 330CE, the Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium. Byzantium was a Greek city in southeastern Europe, which he renamed Constantinople, known today as the Turkish city of Istanbul. After Constantine’s death, the Roman Empire was divided into two parts, with Constantinople the capital of the Greek-speaking eastern half, and Rome the capital of the Latin-speaking western half. Constantinople was the richest and largest European medieval city, exerting a powerful cultural pull and dominating economic life in the Mediterranean. Thanks to its high fortified walls, the city and the Eastern Roman Empire would survive the Barbarians’ constant waves of attacks until 1453CE.

In the west, the Roman Empire would collapse much more quickly. Attracted by the wealth of Rome, Germanic tribes from the North and the East invaded and destroyed the Empire. In 476CE, the order and structure provided by the Roman Empire vanished with the destitution of its last Emperor Romulus Augustus. It seemed that the predictions of the coming of the end of the world were true and that the return of Jesus was at hand. The relative calmness and security that Roman soldiers had provided, the justice system that Roman courts had offered, the roads, ports, and aqueducts the Roman engineers had built; all this now had vanished. But into this world of chaos and gloom stepped one bit of light: the Christian Church.

The Christian Church organizes itself

The Christian Church initially had little organization. But with its acceptance within the Roman Empire and the Frankish kingdom, it had begun to develop a hierarchy. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine, it was natural that the early Christian Church would simply tend to model itself after the Empire. So the Christian Church copied the Roman Empire and established a hierarchy as the chart illustrates, which still exists today.

Just as the Empire had been divided into provinces ruled by governors, the church divided the empire into dioceses ruled by bishops. The Bishop would have his office in the largest city within his diocese, which would also tend to have the largest church. Beneath the bishops would be the priests who would operate at the local level in towns or villages. The larger dioceses would have archbishops, and the largest cities of the Empire (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria) had the highest and most important archbishops who were called patriarchs. It was these patriarchs who basically dictated Church policy and still do. The most important of the patriarchs was the patriarch of Rome. Before Jesus died, he had told his apostle Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and what so ever thou shalt loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.” This was taken to mean that Jesus was naming Peter his direct representative here on Earth, giving him control over who entered Heaven and who did not. Peter traveled to Rome after Jesus’ death and was martyred there. He is considered the first patriarch of Rome and that the power Jesus gave to him was passed down to the following patriarchs. This is called the Petrine Succession; namely that Peter’s power was passed on the patriarch of Rome making them the most important of all the patriarchs.

The Catholic Church: the only order in a Western world gone mad

By the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, this church hierarchy had become well-established. As the civil order disappeared in the face of the barbarian invasions, the church order took over. When looking at this Dark Age period from 476 CE until around 800 CE, it is apparent that the center of all life was the Catholic Church in the west and it’s fairly easy to explain why. The Catholic Church provided the only order in a world gone mad. The Church provided law courts to try cases. The Church took over the State’s function of feeding the poor, the sick, the widows and orphans. It would provide inns, hospitals and refuge in times of war. The Church touched almost everyone’s life in many important ways. It baptized a person at his/her birth, performed the wedding ceremony at his/her marriage, and conducted the burial services at his/her death.

Writing was lost except among the priests who needed to read in order to understand the Bible. And so if you needed a birth recorded, a letter composed, a marriage certificate, a deed for a piece of property, you would have to go to the Church for such things. Whereas we today tend to separate our religious and civil life, in the Dark Ages the two were the same. There was hardly a thing you could do which would not somehow involve the Church. And this went on not only for the poor peasants but, also for the new nobility of barbarians who had little experience in administrative matters. These kings, counts, dukes and lords relied upon priests to keep their records and often run the everyday matters of their feudal estates.

Monasteries became small islands of culture in the flood of barbarianism. While outside literature and art were declining in the face of war and invasion, inside the walls of abbeys, books and learning were preserved. The monks organized scriptoria, or writing offices, in which manuscripts were copied and decorated (or “illuminated”) by hand. The great bulk of the surviving Latin literary works of both Pagan and Christian antiquity were preserved in copies in monasteries. Because they also maintained schools and libraries, the monks were the only intellectuals in society. After the invasions had ceased and Europe had once again settled down, the first steps back towards civilized life would come from these monasteries.

Christian Life: monasticism and asceticism

Perhaps the most important type of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and Dark Ages was monasticism, an ascetic form of Christianity. As the Empire was collapsing, it was clear to many of the faithful that this was indeed the end of the world and that soon Jesus would return. It made no sense then to hold on to the things of this life, these clothes, jewels, estates, and homes. Tens of thousands in both the eastern and western half to the Empire gave their property to the Church, abandoned their families (sometimes forcing their wives and children to become monks and nuns also) and entered the monasteries and convents. There, they gave up their name and spent their days in work and prayer awaiting the second coming of Christ.

It was popular in the eastern Roman Empire to practice solitarymonasticism. The ideal was to live by oneself in the desert or mountains, in a cave or ditch, and abandon things of this life. This was possible in the east where there were far larger cities. This was important since most Eremitic monks did not work, but begged in towns for food. The Western Empire had few large cities that could support large numbers of monks who did nothing but beg. Also, the east experienced far fewer invasions by barbarians initially. Therefore, solitary monks were in less danger of having their guts ripped out by some nasty smelly barbarian.

In the west, communal monasticism was the standard. Monks gathered in monasteries surrounded by thick walls which were meant to keep out both the evils and temptations of the outside world, as well as keep out those nasty smelly barbarians. These monks usually worked together to produce food and supplies for their community.

Around 530 CE, St. Benedict composed a series of rules to guide the monks’ lives. Monasteries were to be self-sustaining and not rely upon the outside world. Everything possible should be either made or grown by the monks. Each person who wished to become a monk had to take a vow of obedience to his superiors in the Church and must tie himself for life to the monastery. The monks’ day was to be divided into three parts: one for prayer, one for sleep, and one for intellectual and manual labor. One must help the sick and the poor. One must be humble and never proud. One must take a lifelong vow of chastity. These Rules of St. Benedict became the standard for not only his Benedictine monks, but other orders of monks as well. This is not to say that corruption did not continue. Those same monasteries contained large numbers of extremely devout people who would try to forget their worldly desires and needs in order to focus on the spiritual. One wonders why anyone would spend days in fasting, hours in prayer, and sometimes beating one’s body wit a whip. But it is important to remember that in this age where death and destruction were commonplace, they believed that this world was soon to end, that the Last Judgment was to begin. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Today. Any hour. Any minute.

The Power(s) of the Church

These monasteries were not without their troubles, however. Donations and taxes (tithe, Peter’s Pence in England) to the Church had made many of the monasteries extremely wealthy. The Church had become the first economic and financial institution of the Middle Ages. Clergymen were therefore not beyond temptation. The idea of the fat monk living more for a bottle of wine and a leg of lamb persisted in popular culture: think of Friar Tuck from the Robin Hood stories! Many ceased working and used their wealth to employ serfs to work for them. They began to wear luxurious clothing and sport jewelry finer than some kings and lords owned. They controlled vast amounts of land, mines and timberlands. The Church as a whole would end up controlling a third of the land in Western Europe, and many abbots or bishops would act as feudal lords. Corruption was sometimes so rampant that it was a constant war by some in the Church to reform their brethren.

The most important theoretician of the EarlyChurch was St Augustine (354-430CE), bishop of Hippo in North Africa. Augustine’s The City of God became the theoretical foundation behind the spiritual power of the Church. For Augustine, what really matters for an individual is not his earthly life (bound to be imperfect and sinful) but the individual’s spiritual destiny, his or her entrance into heaven or hell. One therefore needed to get God’s grace through Faith, and Faith alone: reason and classical humanism are to be rejected as products of an imperfect, sinful world. There was only one truth: that of the Church. One could find it in three ways: in the Bible, through the Church or Revelation through prayers. Those embracing the Church’s teachings would make it to the Kingdom of God, while the others would be declared heretical and would face the Inquisition. How did it work? First, the townspeople would be gathered in a public place. Although attendance was voluntary, those who failed to show would automatically be suspect, so most would come. The inquisitors would provide an opportunity for anyone to step forward and denounce themselves in exchange for easy punishment. As part of this bargain they would need to inform on other heretics. In addition, the inquisitors could simply force people to be interrogated. Once information had been gathered, an inquisitorial trial could begin. The inquisitorial trial generally favored the prosecution (the Church). The defendant would be allowed a lawyer, but if the defendant was convicted, the lawyer would lose his ability to practice. Therefore most lawyers never took the chance of defending a potential heretic. The trials were conducted in secret with only the inquisitors, the defendant and some inquisitorial staff to take notes. Inquisitors sequestered all of the property of the defendant. The defendant was not told the charges, but was always invited to confess, only guessing what for. The accused was expected to self-incriminate and did not have the right to face and question the accuser. It was acceptable to take testimony from criminals, persons of bad reputation, excommunicated people, and convicted heretics. Blood relationship did not exempt one from the duty to testify against the accused. Sentences could not be appealed once made. The inquisitor could keep a defendant in prison for years before the trial to obtain new information. Torture was a common part of the medieval judicial system and not particular to the inquisition. The torture methods used by inquisitors were mild compared to secular courts, as they were forbidden to use methods that resulted in bloodshed, mutilation or death. One of the more common forms of medieval inquisition torture was known as strappado. The hands were bound behind the back with a rope, and the accused was suspended this way, dislocating the joints painfully in both arms. Weights could be added to the legs dislocating those joints as well.

Once the trial was concluded the results might take years to be revealed, during which time the defendant stayed in prison. The inquisitors would save up the cases and announce them at once in a public ceremony called, in Latin, sermo generalis, or "general sermon". Among the possible punishments were a long pilgrimage for first offenders, wearing a yellow cross for life, confiscation of property, banishment, public recantation, or long-term imprisonment. Burning at the stake was only for the most serious cases, including repeat offenders and unrepentant heretics. Execution was done not by the Church, which was forbidden to kill, but by secular officials. The accused could have all of his property confiscated, and in many cases, accusers may have been motivated by a desire to take the property of the accused.

In this context, everyone (including Kings and lords) during the Middle Ages had to abide by the laws of the Church. If not, they could be excommunicated. To excommunicate a person meant to cut him off completely from the Church and take away his hope of going to heaven. Excommunication gave the Popes great power over secular powers such as the lords, kings and even over the Emperor himself. If a lord was excommunicated and continued to rebel after, the church disciplined him with an interdict. This action closed all the churches on the lord’s land. No one on the land could be married or buried with the church’s blessing, and the church bells never rang. The people usually became so discontent that they revolted, and the lord/king would finally yield to the church.

Such political power would sometimes lead to bitter struggles between the Church and the State, like in 1077CE. The dispute between the Pope Gregory VII and the German king Henry IV was over the appointment of bishops, who had been traditionally handled by the monarch. In 1077, the Pope claimed the Church’s right to rule its own affairs, and insisted that the appointment of bishops should be controlled entirely by the church. Henry IV regarded the Pope as a crazy fanatic who was out of control and threatening his authority. He refused to give up his power to ordain, and in return the Pope excommunicated Henry and deposed him as a king. The Pope also declared that all oaths of loyalty to King Henry were dissolved, meaning that the lords no longer had to pay tribute to the king, and could form military alliances with other rulers. Henry IV’s kingdom was threatened by civil war, as German lords used the situation to strike at Henry’s power. The lords declared that they would not recognize the power of the king until the excommunication ban was lifted. The situation was a mess, and Henry IV was left with only one option: ask for the Pope’s forgiveness. In mid-winter, the monarch crossed the Alps into northern Italy and headed for the Pope’s home in the mountains. After three days waiting in the snow, Henry was forgiven and the excommunication ban was finally lifted. The image of the German Emperor pleading for forgiveness illustrates how politically powerful the church was during the Middle Ages.

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