MEDIEVAL CHURCH

   I. Period of dissemination:  5th - 11th c.

1. Gregory the Great (p. 590-604) and temporal power of the papacy

“The Father of the Medieval Papacy,” Gregory began to establish the temporal power of the papacy because his territory was a mess after the fall of Rome.  He had been elected pope in 590 by the people of Rome and was attempting to defend Rome and the surrounding territory against the invading Lombards.  Thus he was the first pope to act as a temporal ruler of the territory that would later become the Papal States.

2. missionary activity of the church

Gregory also took the first step toward papal control outside of Italy by sending Benedictine monks to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons.  In pursuing a policy of extending papal authority over the Christian Church in the west he established the pattern of church government.

3. two scholars of the Early Middle Ages:  Boethius & Bede

“Boethius (c.480-524) received the traditional education typical of the Roman aristocracy.  He met King Theodoric in 505, became his adviser, and eventually rose to be the highest civil official in Italy.  As an example of Roman talent serving a German king, he stands as a symbol of the process of fusion by which the Roman world was transformed to the medieval.  Boethius was also a scholar.  He translated some of the works of Aristotle into Latin, especially his works on logic, and left an important legacy to the medieval world by providing a systematic Latin vocabulary for the analysis of logic.  Boethius’s most famous work was written in prison, where he was kept for a year by Theodoric on a charge of treason before being executed.  This work, On the Consolation of Philosophy, is a dialogue between Boethius and philosophy personified as a woman.  Philosophy leads Boethius to a clear understanding of true happiness and the highest good, which she equates with God.  These are not achieved by outward conditions, since the person who lives virtuously finds happiness within.  Moreover, reason, not faith, enables one to realize the true meaning of happiness.  Basically, Boethius was restating Stoic philosophy rather than Christian theology; nevertheless, he presented it eloquently” (Spiel. 229).

  “The Venerable Bede (c.672-735) was a scholar and product of Christian Anglo-Saxon England.  He entered a monastery at Jarrow as a small boy and remained there most of the rest of his life.  Many historians consider Bede the first major historian of the Middle Ages.  His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, was a product of the remarkable flowering of English ecclesiastical and monastic culture in the eighth century.  His work is a history of England that begins with the coming of Christianity to Britain.  Although Bede shared the credulity of his age in regard to stories of miracles, he had a remarkable sense of history.  He used his sources judiciously to give us our chief source of information about early Anglo-Saxon England.  His work was a remarkable accomplishment for a monk from a small corner of England and reflects the high degree of intellectual achievement of England in the eighth century” (Spiel. 229).

 II. Period of domination of the Church:  12th & 13th c.

1. Cluniac reform and the Investiture Controversy (Gregory VII)

“The domination of lay people over the clergy was perhaps inevitable given the chaotic conditions of the Early Middle Ages.  The church became increasingly entangled in the evolving feudal system.  High officials of the church, such as bishops and abbots, came to hold their offices as fiefs from nobles.  As vassals, they were obliged to carry out the usual services, including military obligations.  For some, this meant taking up arms, even though a prelate of the church was forbidden to kill; for others, it involved providing a contingent of knights to fight for the lord.  Of course, lords assumed the right to choose their own vassals, even when those vassals included bishops and abbots.  Since the lords often selected their vassals from other noble families and chose them for political reasons, it could be expected that this secularization of bishops and abbots would lead to a serious decline in the execution of their spiritual responsibilities.  An abbot, for example, chosen for political reasons by a lay lord, might care little about monastic discipline.  Bishops, in turn, who were responsible for supervising the monasteries in their districts, might pay scant attention to what the monks were doing.  Even at the local level, the parish priests often were simply chosen by lords to serve their purposes” (Spiel. 285).

  “Reform of the Catholic church began in Burgundy in eastern France in 910 when Duke William of Aquitaine founded the abbey of Cluny.  This was the greatest single religious event of the tenth century.  The monastery began with a renewed dedication to the highest spiritual ideals of the Benedictine rule and was fortunate in possessing a series of abbots in the tenth century who exemplified and maintained these ideals.  Cluny was deliberately kept independent from any secular control.  As Duke William stipulated in his original charter:  ‘It has pleased us also to insert in this document that, from this day, those same monks there congregated shall be subject neither to our yoke, nor to that of our relatives, nor to the sway of the royal might, nor to that of any earthly power.’  Finally, the new monastery at Cluny tried to eliminate some of the abuses that had crept into religious communities by stressing the need for work, replacing manual labor with the copying of manuscripts, and demanding more community worship and less private prayer. . . . .

  “Leo IX (1049-1054) was the first of a series of popes who brought new ideals to their leadership of the church and aspired to a universal reform of Christendom.  To ensure the effectiveness of the reform movement, Leo IX instituted structural changes in the government of the church by making regular use of a group of church officials known as cardinals.  The word cardinal had been used as a title of honor for some of the more important priests in the great churches of Rome.  Leo now began to appoint reforming clerics from all over Europe as cardinals and then to use them as his major advisers and administrators.  From this time on, cardinals played a major role in the administration of the church.  In fact, in 1059, a reform church council at Rome tried to eliminate the interference of both roman aristocratic factions and emperors in the choice of popes by decreeing that popes should be elected only by the cardinals.  The election of popes by the college of cardinals has been Catholic practice ever since”  (Spiel 286).

  “One of the reformers named as a cardinal by Leo IX was a monk named Hildebrand.  He was a strong personality, who held a passionate conviction about the need for church reform and papal leadership to accomplish it.  Elected pope in 1073, he was absolutely certain that he had been chosen by God to reform the church.  In pursuit of those aims, Gregory vigorously restated claims of papal power.  His dedication to his ideals led him into the Investiture Controversy, one of the great church-state confrontations of the Middle Ages. . . .

  “King Henry IV (1056-1106) of Germany was also a determined personality.  for many years, German kings had depended upon appointing high-ranking clerics, especially bishops, as their vassals in order to use them as administrators.  While to the popes this might seem an infringement on the freedom of the church, it was a simple matter of political expediency to the German king; without the bishops, he could not hope to maintain his own power vis-à-vis the powerful German nobles.  At the time they entered their offices, bishops in Germany were invested with two symbols:  the regalia, or the symbols of temporal office (a scepter), and the spirtualia, or the symbols of spiritual office (the ring and crozier, or staff).  The kings of Germany had grown accustomed to investing their nominees as bishop with both symbols of office, the temporal and spiritual.  In 1075, Pope Gregory issued a decree forbidding important clerics from receiving their spiritual investiture from lay leaders....

  “The immediate cause of the so-called Investiture Controversy was a disputed election to the bishopric of Milan, an important position because the bishop was also the lay ruler of the city” (Spiel 287).  Henry was excommunicated  and, because of trouble with his powerful nobles who, with the pope’s help, wanted to depose Henry, “met the pope at Canossa in January 1077, admitted his transgressions, and begged for forgiveness and absolution.  Although he made the king wait three days, the pope had no choice but to grant absolution to the penitent sinner and lift the ban of excommunication.  This did not end the problem, however.  Henry IV returned to Germany, engaged in a fierce struggle to crush the nobles who had rebelled against him, and returned to his old practices.  Within three years, pope and king were again locked in combat.  This time, Henry responded to the pope’s second excommunication by leading an army into Italy.  Gregory was forced to leave Rome and died in exile, convinced he had failed.

  “The struggle continued until a new German king and a new pope achieved a compromise in 1122 known as the concordat of Worms.  Under this agreement, a bishop in Germany was first elected by the cathedral canons, although the king had the right to be present at the election, a clear indication that the king could still influence the final outcome.  After election, the nominee paid homage to the king as his lord, who in turn invested him with the symbols of temporal office.  A representative of the pope, however, then invested the new bishop with the symbols of his spiritual office” (Spiel 288).

2. Innocent III (p. 1198-1216), the most powerful pope ever, told the monarchs of Europe: “just as the moon gets her light from the sun, and is inferior to the sun...so the royal power gets the splendor of its dignity from the papal authority” (Spiel. 290).  Examples of his power: excommunicated King John of England until he agreed to the popes’  choice for the archbishop of Canterbury; forced Philip Augustus of France to take back his queen whom he divorced after the wedding night because she had bad breath even though the French clergy had agreed.

3. Fourth Lateran Council

“It was Innocent III who called the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which defined the sacrament of the Eucharist, decreed annual confession for all Christians, and established detailed regulations for the moral behavior of the clergy´ (Spiel. 290).  It also 1) outlawed trial by ordeal, 2) required Jews to wear yellow badges (forbade Christians to do business with them because they charged usury), 3) declared clergy exempt from state taxation, 4) set the number of sacraments at 7 (baptism, confirmation, matrimony--not a sacrament until 12th c., holy orders, penance and confession to priest--now required at least 1/yr., extreme unction --last rites, holy Eucharist 1/yr.  In addition transubstantiation was decided on (est. in 11th and 12th c.).  THE CHURCH HAS BECOME THE NECESSARY INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN GOD AND MEN.

The popes had two powers:  excommunication (no sacraments and no attendance at church services) and interdict (no public worship and only sacraments of baptism and extreme unction).

  In 1233 the papacy established the Inquisition (court to try heretics):  1) accused presumed guilty until proven innocent; 2) torture permitted to secure confession; 3) those persisting in heresy were burned at the stake.

III. Further Monastic reforms:  Cistercians

“The Cistercians emphasized a strict austerity.  they ate a simple diet and possessed only a single robe.  All decorations were eliminated from their churches and monastic buildings, and no gold or silver ornaments were permitted.  The number of hours spent in liturgical services was shortened, leaving more time for prayer and manual labor.  Unlike Benedictine and Cluniac houses, Cistercian monasteries were not supported by peasant labor.  To escape from the world, many Cistercians established their monasteries on uninhabited lands, usually wastelands or virgin forests” (Spiel. 291).  The ironic thing is that they are criticizing the luxury of the church, yet they will create “a widespread ‘economic empire,’ and in the process, many of their monasteries became very wealthy” (Spiel. 291). 

 IV. Heresies of the 12th c.

“The desire for more personal and deeper religious experience, which characterized the spiritual revival of the High Middle Ages, also led people into directions hostile to the institutional church.  From the twelfth century on, religious dissent became a serious problem for the Catholic Church.

    “One form of dissent was anticlericalism.  Although some people were orthodox in their religious beliefs, they condemned bishops and priests who failed to live up to the moral standards expected of them. . . .

    “Other Christians moved beyond anticlericalism or incorporated it into a larger framework of dissenting thought.  Their desire for meaningful religious experience could and did lead to heresy or the holding of religious doctrines different from the orthodox teachings of the church.  Since even contemporaries observed that heresies seemed to expand as cities grew in number and size, it may be that the concentration of people in urban areas encouraged the spread of heresy.

    “the two best-known heresies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Catharism and Waldensianism.

1. Cathars

“The Cathars (the word Cathar means “pure”) were also called Albigensians after the city of Albi, one of their strongholds in southern France.  They believed in a dualist system in which good and evil were separate and distinct.  The things of the spirit were good since they were created by a God of light; the things of the world were evil since they were created by Satan, the prince of darkness.  Humans, too, were enmeshed in dualism. Their souls, which were good, were trapped in material bodies, which were evil.  Jesus was not divine because he had possessed an evil human body.  He was merely an emissary of God who was sent to show people the way out of the soul’s entrapment.  According to the Cathars, the Catholic church, itself a materialistic institution, had nothing to do with God and was essentially evil....There was no need to follow its teachings or recognize its authority.   Catharism also advocated strict asceticism, including fasting and abstention from sexual relations.  Since the spirit had become entrapped in the flesh, the procreation of more children simply forced more souls into evil physical bodies.  The Cathars had two levels of practitioners, however.  Only a tiny priestly cast, the ‘perfect ones,’ adhered to these rigid puritanical standards.  The majority of Cathars, the ‘believers,’ married and led more relaxed lives.  The Cathar movement gained valuable support form important nobles in southern France and northern Italy, especially Raymond IV, count of Toulouse, the chief lord of southern France” (Spiel. 299-300). 

2. Waldensians

“[Peter Waldo] was a wealthy French merchant whose background was quite similar to that of Saint Francis.  He, too, experienced moments of religious enlightenment in which he decided to give up all of his material possessions, adopt a life of poverty, and preach to the people in the vernacular.  In his sermons, he used biblical texts that emphasized the rejection of material goods and the pursuit of the ideal of apostolic poverty.  When the archbishop of Lyons ordered Waldo to stop preaching in public because he had no license to preach, he appealed to the pope.  The pope accepted Waldo and his followers’ wish to dedicate their lives to poverty, but forbade them to preach without their bishop’s consent.  The Waldensians refused to give up preaching, however, and defied the church authorities.  Their message had a strong appeal in southern France--a region notorious for its inept clerical leadership--where Catharism had also spread.  The unwillingness of the Waldensians to accept the church’s authority led to their public condemnation as heretics in 1183. . . .

   “The spread of heretical movements in southern France alarmed the church authorities.  Pope Innocent III determined to solve the problem, initially by sending preachers to convince the heretics to return to the orthodox Catholic faith.  But the preachers had little success, and when the leaders of southern France refused to help, the pope decided to use force.  His appeal to the nobles of southern France for a crusade against the heretics fell on receptive ears, especially by nobles eager for adventure, plunder, and gain.

    “The crusade against the Albigensians, which began in the summer of 1209 and lasted for almost two decades, was a bloody one.  Thousands of heretics (and the innocent) were slaughtered, including entire populations of some towns.  In Beziers, for example, 7,000 men, women, and children were massacred when they took refuge in the local church.  The count of Toulouse and other lords were stripped of their lands.

    “Southern France was devastated, but Catharism remained.  Over a period of years, the church’s efforts to devise a method for discovering and dealing with heretics led to the emergence of the papal inquisition.  By 1233, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) had entrusted both Dominicans and Franciscans with inquisitorial powers that had formerly belonged only to bishops.  The Holy Office, as the Inquisition was called, became a formal court whose job it was to ferret out and try heretics.  The Dominicans became especially known for their roles as inquisitor-generals.”

    “Gradually, the Holy Office developed its inquisitorial procedure.  Anyone could be accused of heresy since the identity of the accuser was not revealed to the indicted heretic.  If the accused heretic confessed, he or she was forced to perform public penance and was subjected to punishment, such as flogging; the heretic’s property was then confiscated and divided between the secular authorities and the church.  Beginning in 1252, those not confessing voluntarily were subjected to torture.  Those who refused to confess and were still considered guilty were turned over to the secular authorities for execution.  So also were relapsed heretics--those who confessed, did penance, and then reverted to heresy again” (Spiel. 301).

  V. Friars

1. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)

“Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) was born to a wealthy Italian merchant family.  He enjoyed fighting in the petty local wars typical of the Italian political scene  in the thirteenth century.  After having been captured and imprisoned during one of these struggles, he had a series of dramatic spiritual experiences that led him to abandon all worldly goods and material pursuits and to live and preach in poverty, working and begging for his food.  His simplicity, joyful nature, and love for others soon attracted a band of followers, all of whom took vows of absolute poverty, agreeing to reject all property and live by working and begging for their food.  Francis drew up a simple rule for his followers that consisted merely of biblical precepts focusing on the need to preach and the importance of poverty.  He sought approval for his new rule from Pope Innocent III, who confirmed the new order as the Order of Friars Minor, more commonly know as the Franciscans” (Spiel. 294).

  Born Giovanni Bernardone but his father didn’t like the name so he called him Francis or “little Frenchman.”  He was not a romantic hippie with a bird on his shoulder, but he did reject his upper-class status and cast his lot with the urban proletariat.  His emphasis on the beauty of nature, the ideal of simplicity, and the humanity of Christ could be seen as the first seed of the Renaissance.  It was particularly Francis’ simplicity, joyful nature and love for others that attracted a band of followers.

2. Dominic Guzman (1170-1221)

“The Order of Preachers, popularly known as the Dominicans or the Black Friars (the Franciscans were the Grey Friars from the color of their robes), was created through the efforts of a Spanish priest, Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221).  Unlike Francis, Dominic was an intellectual who was particularly appalled by the growth of heretical movements within the church.  He came to believe that a new religious order of men who lived lives of apostolic poverty but were learned and capable of preaching effectively would best be able to attack and eliminate heresy.  With the approval of Pope Innocent III, the Dominicans became an order of mendicant (begging) friars in 1215” (Spiel l 295-6).  The Dominicans would make great contributions to philosophy and theology (e.g. Albertus Magnus & Thomas Aquinas), but also become the leaders of the Inquisition.

 VI. Veneration of Saints & Relics

“From its early centuries, the church had recognized men and women who displayed eminent holiness as saints’ they held a special position in the spiritual hierarchy that enabled them to act as intercessors before the throne of god.  As time passed, their intercessionary powers and ability to protect poor souls made the saints increasingly important at the popular level.  Christ’s apostles were, of course, universally recognized throughout Europe as saints, but there were also numerous local saints who were of especial significance to a single area, such as Saint Swithun in Winchester, England.  New cults developed rapidly, particularly in the intense religious atmosphere of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  The English introduced Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, who remains instantly recognizable today through his identification with Santa Claus.

  “Of all the saints, the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ, occupied the foremost position in the High Middle Ages.  The cult of Mary took on two important aspects.  Mary was viewed as the most important mediator with her son Christ, the judge of all sinners.  Moreover, from the eleventh century on, with the heightened interest in Jesus as infant, boy, and man, a fascination with Mary as Jesus’ human mother became more evident.  A sign of Mary’s importance is the growing number of churches all over Europe that were dedicated to her in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  As Mary became more popular, the number of stories about miracles occurring through her intercession also increased dramatically” (Spiel. 297).

  “The devout exalted Mary as the Universal Mother whose love for her son was a manifestation of her love for humanity and on whose behalf she acted as an intermediary with god.  The faithful credited  her with performing miracles and commemorated her life with special festivals.  Revered as the queen of heaven and one who was ‘exalted above the choirs of angels,’ Mary symbolized the dignity to which women could aspire” (Greaves 269).

  Emphasis on the role of the saints was closely tied to the use of relics, which also increased significantly in the High Middle Ages.  Relics were usually the bones of saints or objects intimately connected to saints that were considered worthy of veneration by the faithful.  A twelfth-century English monk began his description of the abbey’s relics by saying that ‘There is kept there a thing more precious than gold,... the right arm of St. Oswald....This we have seen with our own eyes and have kissed, and have handled with our own hands....There are kept here also part of his ribs and of the soil on which he fell.’  The monk went on to list additional relics possessed by the abbey, which included two pieces of Christ’s swaddling clothes, pieces of Christ’s manger and part of the five loaves of bread with which Christ fed 5,000 people.  Since the holiness of the saint was considered to be inherent in his relics, these objects were believed to be capable of healing people or producing other miracles” (Spiel. 297).

Send comments and questions to Dr. Richard Baldwin, Gulf Coast State College.
This page last updated 3/17/12