Medieval Christianity

“ The Catholic Church is the oldest, and in numbers still the most powerful of all Christian organizations. It grew as the Christian spirit extended among the ruins of the old world, by the might of the truth borne in its bosom overpowering the old worship, the artifice of priests, the selfishness of the affluent, the might of the strong, the cherished forms of a thousand years, the impotent armies of purple kings. It rose from small beginnings. No one knows who first brought Christianity to Rome ”

“ Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought : the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The over mastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy : politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. ”

“ Why was Christianity itself most eagerly embraced when its light was obscured by fables and superstitions? Why did the Roman Empire perish, with all the aid of a magnificent civilization; why did this civilization itself retrograde; why did its art and literature decline? Why did the grand triumphs of Protestantism stop in half a century after Luther delivered his message? What made the mediaeval popes so powerful? What gave such ascendency to the Jesuits? Why is the simple faith of the primitive Christians so obnoxious to the wise, the mighty, and the noble? ”

“ One writer has lately told us, that our Reformers wished the people to be taught, "that, for almost seven hundred years, the church was most pure." Are we, then, to hold that "primitive antiquity" embraces a period of nearly seven centuries? Seven centuries are considerably more than a third part of the whole duration of the church, from its foundation to this hour: can the third part of a nation's history be called its primitive antiquity? Is a tenet, or a practice taught when Christianity had been more than six hundred years in the world, to be called primitive? ”

“ Mediæval conversion to Christianity was, as a rule, tribal, or national, rather than individual, or personal, and consequently it took some time before satisfactory [232] fruitage was noticeable in the lives of the people. But it was a great victory to substitute the Christian for the pagan ideal. The agencies employed to carry out this process of conversion were: (1) missionaries, mostly Latin, Celtic, English, German, Greek, and Slavic monks; (2) the sword in the hands of a stern ruler; (3) the marriage of Christian women to pagan kings and princes ”

“ Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be conceived and practised as a way of living—nothing more nor less. ”

“ Even the Roman language has remained the official language of the Roman Catholic Church down through the ages. Christianity could not grow up through Roman civilisation and paganism, however, without in turn being coloured and influenced by the rites, festivities, and ceremonies of old polytheism. Christianity not only conquered Rome, but Rome conquered Christianity. ”

“ Roman Catholicism, too, has been a fighting faith, and in the appalling century and a half of religious wars that set in with the Protestant Reformation it was the older faith that first resorted to force. ”

“ If the attempt of John Scotus to change Christianity into a philosophy failed to make an impression upon the succeeding age, it is the less surprising when we consider that he failed in company with all the wise men of the ninth century. ”

“ Rather than condemn the mistakes of the Middle Age Church from whose darkened and superstitious interpretations we yet suffer, let us beware we do not repeat their mistakes by shutting out the new light of history and archæology and science, where we should welcome it.
Christianity does not need to apologize for itself, or beg the question. ”

“ It counts it to be a comedy played out, a stale medieval superstition, and a name that is trampled in the earth. In every age the Church has been militant and in warfare. It is under the same law of suffering which crucified its divine Head. His throne was a cross, and His crown was of thorns. Nevertheless He triumphed, and He triumphs still, and shall triumph to the end. And so at this moment, in this nineteenth century, in the century of modern civilization, of light, of progress, of scientific affectation, the Catholic Church is derided. ”

“ Perfection implies their survival ’unconfounded and undestroyed.’
His entire conception of the recovery of all things, of a unity into which the trinity of nature is resolved, is certainly the most original feature in the system of the Irish thinker. In dividing up theology on a philosophical basis he achieved a greater discovery than he was perhaps conscious of. He discovered that the doctrine of the church was not stationary but progressive ; it was susceptible of development, of indefinite expansion. He discovered in Christianity the germs of all truth. ”

“ The first element which was absorbed was the least Roman, the Graeco-Oriental cults. Christianity had been originally the worship of God, as he was understood by the Jews, combined with the belief that Jesus was he whom God had appointed, or would appoint, as his representative at the day of judgement. To this were now joined the longings for private salvation of the less fortunate classes in the Roman Empire, and their belief that this salvation could come from sacraments instituted by a Lord who was either divine by nature or had attained apotheosis. ”

“ During the Middle Ages they were made almost exclusively to subserve ecclesiastical and theological ends, but now they were conducted in a thoroughly independent spirit, for the purpose of universal human culture. This “humanism” emancipated itself from the service of the church, assumed toward Christianity for the most part an attitude of lofty indifference, and often lost itself in a vain worship of pagan antiquity. Faith was mocked at as well as superstition; sacred history and Greek mythology were treated alike. ”

“ In a very few centuries after Christianity became national in most parts of Europe, although the church of Rome had already introduced many corruptions in religion; yet the piety of early Christians, as well as the new converts, was so great, and particularly princes, as well as noblemen and other wealthy persons, that they built many religious houses, for those who were inclined to live in a recluse or solitary manner, endowing those monasteries with land. ”

“ The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and [Pg 526] temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. ”

“ There are Catholics everywhere—in the University, the Ecole Normale, the front ranks of literature. But with few exceptions they are all Modernist; they have thrown overboard the whole fatras of legend and tradition. Christianity has become to them a symbolical and spiritual religion ”

“ Nay, I can readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior excellence of the Christian religion ”

“ Yet it may be doubted whether the clouds have rolled completely away, and it is fairly certain that the many learned and able Catholic priests who have done so much to elucidate the origins and tendencies of ancient religions other than their own have until lately avoided the discussion of their relations with the earliest forms of Christianity. ”

“ The Roman Church and the Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the eighteenth century shows little of this trait. ”

“ I had a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had well-nigh faded out of the land through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored. ”

“ Christianity, springing up in Judæa within the first century of the Empire, spread through and around it like an interlacing vine,—sweet and wholesome in its early fruits, strong as a bond, powerful as a regenerating influence. But when the ecclesiasticism of a politically fashioned Church had been grafted on the Christian vine, it bore then the evil seeds of new corruption, new discord, new maladies for the Roman world. ”

“ When the aid of a Christian saint is sought in order to secure fertility, the trust in the phallus-symbol involves no unworthy desire; and what is true of medieval European peoples may have been true of ancient peoples. In the ancient world these cults took many forms, ranging from naïve faith to frank obscenity on the one hand and philosophic breadth on the other hand. They take their place as part of the general worship of the forces of nature, and follow all the variations of human culture. ”

“ We do not object to such an interpretation; nevertheless, in specifying the influence of the church, even before the empire fell, the creation of pulpit eloquence should be mentioned, since this has contributed so much to the moral elevation of Christendom. Christianity would be shorn of half her triumphs were it not for the public preaching of her truths. Paganism had no public teachers who regularly taught the people and stimulated their noblest energies. ”

“ The application of this test shows that Catholic Christianity, which alone can claim unbroken, unaltered historical continuity and universality from the apostolic age, is the genuine and absolute religion of Christ. Any other species is unknown to history as an historical religion. The Catholic faith, worship, and discipline manifest themselves in the church of apostolic succession at the earliest period in which this church is clearly and distinctly visible through the medium of historical testimony. ”

“ When the Church towards the middle of the second century was sorely harassed by divisions, its situation was extremely critical and embarrassing. Christianity had appeared among men bearing the olive branch of peace, and had proposed to supersede the countless superstitions of the heathen by a faith which would bind the human race together in one great and harmonious family. ”

“ No Church but an aristocratic one could have dominated such a situation. The very qualities which the modern man most resents in the Roman Catholic Church--its authority, its dogmatism, its spiritual powers of intimidation--were the qualities which enabled it to evangelize the vast heathen and barbarian masses. ”

“ So history seems to indicate, from the times of Theodosius to our own, specially illustrated by the establishment of the different monastic orders, the great awakenings under Luther and Calvin and Knox, the successes of Jesuits and Jansenists, the triumphs of the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Methodists, the rise of Puseyism, or the Church of England. That Christianity remains vital in the world, and makes true advances from generation to generation, can scarcely be questioned. ”

“ But there are many reasons why this dangerous and disintegrating tendency must be rigorously excluded from Roman Catholicism. In the first place, Modernism destroys the historical basis of Christianity, and converts the Incarnation and Atonement into myths like those of other dying and rising saviour-gods, which hardly pretend to be historical. But it was this foundation in history which helped largely to secure the triumph of Christianity over its rivals. In the place of the historical God-Man, Modernism gives us the history of the Church as an object of reverence. ”

“ We have the religion, not the superstition, of the middle ages; of that epoch so unworthily calumniated we preserve all the elements truly Christian, and reject the others. We recognize in that rude and laborious age the dawn, the beautiful dawn, of Catholic civilization so scandalously interrupted by the Renaissance. ”

“ When the church seemed to be departing from its spiritual dignity and defiling its ceremonial by the superstitions and the prodigies of heathenism, or when its pontiffs seemed to have adopted all the vices of secular princes and to have exchanged totally the church for the world, there were rarely wanting advocates of a purer Christian order, advocates whose denunciations might rival in vehemence those of a modern protestant. ”

“ The religion that civilized England, and consecrated every remarkable spot in it to the service of God, had become a thing of the past, and the relics of Catholic piety that studded the land were looked upon as the gravestones of its corse, or the trophies of vanquishing Protestantism. Not only was Catholicity supposed to be dead in England, but its memory was in execration; nurses frightened the children with phantoms of monks, and mountebank preachers took their inspiration from the prejudices they had imbibed in childhood. ”