07: The Middle Ages - Overview

Introduction

If you think back to our first lesson, I was relieved that, because we had an extra week, I could break it up into two lessons. The reason was that lesson covered almost 300 years and I didn’t think I could do that in an hour.

Well, this week we’re going to cover the Middle Ages. Now, what period of time that covers is debatable, there wasn’t a sign that people came to saying, “Now Entering the Middle Ages.” However, as a rough estimate we’re talking about the period from about 950 A.D. to 1500 – so about 550 years.

Here are just some of the things that took place in those years:

· The rise of monasticism

· The Bubonic plague where Europe’s population decreased by 60% (14th cent.)

· The Crusades (11th to 13th) - This will cover in more detail in the next lesson

· The Spanish Inquisition (15th)

· Split of the church into East and West (11th& 12th)

· Norman Conquest of Britain (1066)

· Rise of Islam (from before this time until the fall of Constantinople in 1453)

· The Feudal System

· Incredible Cathedrals

· Beginnings of universities

· The beginnings of the Reformation

· The fall of Constantinople (1453)

That’s our task this morning.

So, to make it doable, I’ve chosen four topics:

· Monasticism

· Anselm & Aquinas

· Forerunners of Reformation

· Fall of Constantinople

Next time we’ll cover the Crusades in more detail.

But before we start here’s a question:

What were the Middle Ages in the middle of?

The term was actually coined in the Renaissance. The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century.[i]

They saw the Middle Ages kind of as “fly over country” – a time when everything was on hold until the really smart people rediscovered classical civilization and rescued society from cultural darkness.

And the truth is, we tend to do that with church history as well. We tend to see church history like this:

Acts —-> Persecution ——> Long period of heresy & darkness ——> The Reformation

But the reality is a lot went on in the Middle Ages, much of which was good for Christianity and the church so it’s definitely a period worth learning about.

MONASTICISM

Monasticism began long before the Middle Ages. The first Monks didn’t live in monasteries with others like we normally think of when we think of monks. They were more like hermits living alone out in the desert or other solitary place. The work “monk” comes from the Greek word monachos, which means “solitary.” [ii]

What do you think may have motivated people to separate from culture and go to a solitary place to practice their faith?

However, by the Middle Ages that had changed, and communities of monks began to form, usually around a leader whose teaching the order would adopt. Most of the monastic orders you’ve heard of began during this time, Franciscans, Dominicans, Cistercians, Benedictines, etc.

Many of these orders were originally Mendicant orders, which meant they forsook all worldly goods and were dependent upon charity from others for their support. Franciscan Monks (named for their founder St. Francis of Assisi) singing, preaching and begging for money became a common sight in Western Europe. [iii] The idea was to withdraw from the sinful world and its distractions to better serve Christ.

What problems do you see with that approach?

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. – Colossians 2:20-23

I think therein lies the problem. These kinds of spiritual disciplines are not the spiritual disciplines we’re called to purse in scripture.

Each monastic order had its own rules, usually written by the founder, to govern the conduct of members. One of the most famous was the Rule of St. Benedict that governed Benedictine Monks. Though written earlier than the time period we’re dealing with here, it is representative of many such documents and continued to be used in the Middle Ages, most notably by the Benedictine Monks at Cluny in France. Many of the great monasteries of the Middle Ages were Benedictine.

Here is some of what it says:

“The vice of personal ownership must by all means be cut out in the monastery by the very root, so that no one may presume to give or receive anything without the command of the Abbot; nor to have anything whatever as his own, neither a book, nor a writing tablet, nor a pen, nor anything else whatsoever, since monks are allowed to have neither their bodies nor their wills in their own power.”

Philip Schaff in his History of the Christian Church says:

The monkish sanctity is a flight from the world rather than a victory over the world, an abstinence from marriage instead of a sanctification of marriage, chastity, outside rather than inside the order of nature, a complete suppression of the sensual passion in the place of its purification and control. But it had a powerful influence over the barbaric races and was one of the chief converting and civilizing agencies.[iv]

Unfortunately, this commitment to austerity was often accompanied by a belief that such rigorous ways of living were earning acceptance with God. To obey the Abbot was to obey God in many of these monasteries. You began to see this separation between the sacred and the secular leading to a two-tiered Christianity. If you were really a strong Christian, you became a monk. If you were kind of an average Christian, you married, had a family, farmed, etc.

“If we desire to dwell in the tabernacle of His kingdom, we cannot reach it in any way, unless we run thither by good works.”

So, the works were becoming the thing that made us holy and got us accepted by God.

We also see in this the beginnings of the confusion between sanctification and justification that made its way into the medieval church and persists in Roman Catholicism to the present day.

Eventually Monasteries became less and less austere, began to own property and became powerful organizations, wealthy organizations. Monks also became teachers of those outside the monastery, not just within and many of the early university professors in Europe were monks.

The rise of monasteries had a significant impact on the church and Christian theology. During the Middle Ages, most Christian theologians of import were either members of monastic communities or had close links with them. [v] We’ll look at a couple of examples in a minute.

Lest you think everything about monasteries was bad, here again from Philip Schaff:

They offered a quiet retreat to men and women who were weary of the turmoil of life, or had suffered shipwreck of fortune or character, and cared for nothing but to save their souls. They exercised hospitality to strangers and travelers, and were a great blessing in times when traveling was difficult and dangerous…They saved the remnants of ancient civilization for future use. Every large convent had a library and a school. Scribes were employed in copying manuscripts of the ancient classics, of the Bible, and the writings of the fathers. To these quiet literary monks we are indebted for the preservation and transmission of nearly all the learning, sacred and secular, of ancient times. If they had done nothing else, they would be entitled to the lasting gratitude of the church and the world.

ANSELM & AQUINAS

The Middle Ages was also an age of scholasticism (scholasticism is merely theology as studied and practiced in schools). As I mentioned earlier, the university as an institution in Western culture originated in medieval times and this model continued virtually unchanged into at least the 19th century. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Sorbonne or the University of Paris, it was founded in the 1253 and remains one of the leading universities of Europe - so too Oxford University in England which was founded in 1096.

Two of the leading thinkers of the Middle Ages were Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas.

Anselm of Canterbury (1033 – 1109)

Anselm was born in Italy but moved to France. He mastered the arts of logic and grammar and acquired a formidable reputation as a teacher at the Abbey of Bec – a Benedictine monastery in Normandy, which was founded in 1034, just a year after Anselm’s birth.[vi]

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anselm was invited to become the Archbishop of Canterbury

Theological Contributions

Anselm is best known for developing the Ontological Argument for the existence of God and for his work on the necessity of Christ’s incarnation.

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of “being.” It deals with such questions as what kinds of beings exist and how they are grouped, related to one another, etc. In his work Proslogian in 1078 Anselm outlines the Ontological Argument this way:

Anselm's argument in Chapter 2 can be summarized as follows:

It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined). God exists as an idea in the mind. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist). But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.) Therefore, God exists.[vii]

In probably his most famous work Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), he outlines why it was necessary for God to take on flesh. In this work he argues that human beings have an obligation before God for their sin but do not have the resources to deal with their sin. God on the other hand has the resources (ability) to deal with sin and so He became flesh so the human obligation could be met by one who had the ability to do so.

One thing we see in Anselm’s work on this topic is the idea that God must act according to His justice - He can’t just let sin go, in order for it to be forgiven, it must be paid for. This was an improvement over the “Christus Victor” or “Ransom” approach that was common at the time and saw the atonement more as Christ ransoming sinners back from Satan. Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) came up with the “Moral Influence Theory” as a response which basically said Christ died to influence men to be better people by softening their hearts through a dramatic display of God’s love. This was the more influential view among Medieval theologians.

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274)

Aquinas is probably the most famous and influential theologian of the Middle Ages.[viii]He too was born in Italy but moved to France. He was from a wealthy family (his father was Count Landulf of Aquino) and decided in his late teens to join the Dominican order. His parents, however, wanted him to become a Benedictine because that was more prestigious. They had in mind him becoming abbot of one of the prominent Benedictine Abbeys. When he could not be dissuaded, the family locked him away in one of their castles to try to force him to their will. However, he eventually escaped, became a Dominican monk and pursued studies in theology at the University of Paris where he eventually became a professor.

Theological Contributions

Aquinas is best known for his systematic theology the Summa Theologica. He also wrote an apologetic work called Summa Contra Gentiles where he explains how to defend the faith when talking with Muslims and Jews.

He is also well known for positing five arguments for the existence of God. Among them are the Teleological Argument (Teleology is the study of design or purpose) and the argument from motion.

The Teleological argument or the argument from design basically says the things we see in the world show evidence of having been designed; therefore, there must be a designer.

The argument from motion is a cause and effect argument. Everything that is in motion was acted on by something else. Since an infinite regression of causes is nonsensical, there must be a first cause, an unmoved mover. That unmoved mover is God.

Aquinas’ philosophical influence was Aristotle. Aristotle’s works had only recently been rediscovered via contact with Muslim culture. Up until that point, most theologians in the west were influenced by Plato (including Anselm mentioned earlier).

The difference in the two schools of philosophy is in where truth and reality are found. Plato says all that we see is but a shadow of the perfect “forms” that are in the heavenly realm and that we know what things are because we have a distant memory of these “forms” from before we were born. Christian philosophers adapted that to make the point that ultimate truth is not found in this plane but must come from God. We cannot truly know anything apart from divine revelation.

Aristotle on the other hand, said what we know comes from our senses, from this plane. Theologians such as Aquinas used that to elevate human reason to a place of authority that it did not have under a platonic model.

You kind of see this in his arguments for God. All of them are based on human reason – though he would not deny that the Holy Spirit’s action is necessary for people to be converted or even to know ultimate truth (The Summa makes the point that Theology is the most certain of all sciences since its source is divine knowledge (which cannot be deceived) and because of the greater worth of its subject matter, the sublimity of which transcends human reason) he did believe that many things about God could be known by man using unaided reason (such as the fact of his existence). This eventually got Aquinas in trouble with the Bishop of Paris who saw this teaching as heretical. Aquinas was forced to leave the university in 1270. Five years after he died, he was still considered a heretic. However, by fifty years after his death Pope John XXII had made him a Saint of the Catholic Church. Aquinas today is considered by the RCC to be their foremost theologian. He is what they call a Doctor of the Church of which from what I can tell designates him as having been particularly significant in the history of the church.

Over time, Aquinas’ optimism about human reason and human nature was developed by subsequent theologians into the notion of justification by grace through man’s cooperation with God.

FORERUNNERS OF THE REFORMATION

Now on to forerunners of the Reformation…there were also theologians during this time who found themselves at odds with the established church because of what they believed.

In the city of Worms in Germany where Luther stood trial for heresy there’s a statue of him. At the base of that statue four men are seated:

John Wycliffe, John Hus, Peter Waldo, and the more obscure Girolamo Savonarola.

They are at the base because they paved the way for Luther. They planted and watered the plant of reformation that finally bloomed in the sixteenth century.

Peter Waldo

In the 12th Century in Southern France, a merchant named Peter Waldo gave everything he had to the poor and began preaching publically against both the immorality and the bad doctrines of the church, especially the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory.

While Peter Waldo himself is a bit difficult to nail down historically, his followers, called the “Waldensians,” developed through the 13th and the 14th centuries very clear doctrines that later Protestant reformers would pick up,

(a) including the idea of Scripture alone as the source of authority both in the church and in the believer’s life,

(b) the idea that the Bible should be in the common language (Peter Waldo himself commissioned translations of the Vulgate into French),

(c) and the idea of voluntarily giving to the poor, rather than doing so in expectation of paying for sin.

The Waldensian movement spread across Southern France and Northwestern Italy, despite cruel persecution on the part of both church and state.

During the Reformation, the Waldensians joined with the Reformed branch of Protestantism

Their major contribution to the Reformation was that they provided the basis and the funding for Calvin’s French translation and publication of the Bible.

John Wycliffe

In the late 14th century, an Oxford professor named John Wycliffe grew frustrated with the papacy, which was at the time contested by two rival popes.

Influenced by reading Augustine, Wycliffe held that Christ’s true church is not necessarily the pope and his hierarchy.

(a) Rather, the real Body of Christ consists of those elected by God unto salvation.

(b) This teaching had powerful implications.

(i) First, Wycliffe came to believe that the pope and many other church leaders were probably reprobate.

(ii) Second, because all true believers comprised the church, it followed that they should be able to read the Bible in their own language, in order to know God’s will for themselves and for the church.

After he died, Wycliffe’s followers translated the Bible into English [Wycliffe Bible translators].

Though not formally excommunicated, Wycliffe soon found himself out of favor with church authorities, and he retired to the margins of English society, and died in 1384.

His followers, known as Lollards, eagerly began to spread his teachings, as well as copies of English Bibles, throughout the land.

Though many Lollards were put to death for their beliefs, they took Wycliffe’s writings as far as Bohemia, or present-day Czechoslovakia (which connects to our next guy as we’ll see in a minute).

In 1415 at the Council of Constance, Wycliffe was declared to be a heretic, and in 1428 his bones were dug up, burned, and the ashes cast into the river Swift.

Wycliffe’s nickname is “The Morning Star of the Reformation.”

John (or Jan) Huss

Wycliffe’s teachings found an eager audience in a Bohemian priest known as John Huss, who in 1402 became rector of the University of Prague.

Huss’s original concern was moral. Disgusted by the degenerate church authorities, he sought to restore Christian leadership to its former ideals.

Influenced by Wycliffe, Huss came to believe that only God’s elect people comprised the true universal church, and that the Bible provided the supreme authority by which all Christians are to be guided and judged – including the pope.

Huss also warned his people against the superstitions of the day, worship of images and relics.

About this time, Pope John XXIII (later declared an anti-Pope!), hoping to expand his power, proclaimed a crusade against Naples and decided to finance it by selling indulgences.

Huss believed that only God can forgive sins, and that attempting to profit off God’s prerogative was profoundly wrong.

He protested against the Pope’s cynical move, and in response, the Pope excommunicated Huss.

A sympathetic emperor then invited Huss to defend himself before the upcoming Council of Constance.

The duplicitous Pope John tricked Huss, however, and had him burned at the stake in 1415 at the Council when Huss refused to recant his beliefs.

As he was being tied to the stake, Huss prayed aloud “Lord Jesus, it is for thee that I patiently endure this cruel death. I pray thee to have mercy on my enemies.”

Pockets of Hussites persisted throughout Europe for the next century, until the actions of an obscure German monk brought them new hope.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

We’ll end this morning with one of the most cataclysmic events in church history, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire (Islam). This takes us from Western Europe and the Roman Catholic Church back to the east and the Orthodox Church. You’ll recall from last time that the eastern and western church had split over the filioque clause among other things.

Constantinople had survived many attacks over the years and her position as well as the thickness and strength of her walls caused many to believe she was unconquerable.

However, on April 6, 1453, following a 53 day siege, Sultan Mehmet II’s armies entered Constantinople and captured it. Thousands of civilians were killed as the city was looted and thousands more deported to work as slaves. After 1,500 years the last remnant of the Roman Empire was no more. Many historians see the fall of Constantinople as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.

Since the route to the east was now controlled by the Ottomans, nations in the west began to look for other routes to India and other trading points eastward resulting in an era of exploration that began in the years after the fall.

The fall of Constantinople also played a part in ushering in the Renaissance. Eastern scholars fled west, bringing with them ancient Greek texts that had been, in many cases unknown in the west leading to a revival of interest in the classical world.

Byzantine Christians fled west, bringing a storehouse of ancient writings, manuscripts, and biblical text. This not only introduced many Christians who were not loyal to the Pope, but also prepared the way for the learning that was to follow.[ix]

[i] http://www.britannica.com/event/Renaissance [ii]The Story of Christianity, Justo Gonzalez, p. 138 [iii]Gonzalez, p. 304 [iv]Schaff, Philip, History Of The Christian Church (The Complete Eight Volumes In One) (Kindle Locations 41513-41516). [v]Historical Theology, Alister E. McGrath, p. 96 [vi]McGrath, p. 113 [vii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument [viii]McGrath, p. 136 [ix] http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2012/11/why-the-reformation-happened-when-it-did/