Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Number of quotes: 39
Book ID: 265 Page: 5
Section: 3A1
Christianity had re-created the unity of Europe on a spiritual level. This spiritual unity would, indeed, be fully realized, in the ensuing centuries, in a Latin Christendom dominated by the medieval papacy. But it would no longer be found, as in the glory days of Rome, in the creation of a single, civilized, political community.
Quote ID: 6690
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 265 Page: 6
Section: 4B
The “Rise of Western Christendom” amounted to little more than a salvage operation - the preservation, within Christian monasteries, of what little remained of the culture of Rome and the slow renewal of a sense of community around a “Roman” Catholic Church. And in the period between 400 and 1000, this salvage operation had been, at best, a messy business, unredeemed by flashes of genius, and frequently thwarted by outbursts of “barbarism.”
Quote ID: 6691
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 265 Page: 8
Section: 4B
Not only did Christian intellectuals bring the skills of writing to previously non-literate societies. They brought ways of writing historical narratives which derived from the Old Testament and from the historical traditions of the Roman world which Christians had already adapted to their own needs in earlier centuries. We owe almost all that we know of the history and literature of pre-Christian northern Europe to learned clergymen who set to work with urgency and with great intelligence to make their own, for their own needs, large sections of the pre-Christian past. As a result, the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which saw the triumph of Christianity, can also be seen as the last great age of myth-making in northern Europe.
Quote ID: 6692
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 265 Page: 12
Section: 4B
As we will see in Chapter 5, the total reversion of the economy of post-imperial Britain to a condition more crude, in many aspects, than in pre-Roman times, was not due to the inroads of barbarian invaders. Barbarian raiding was secondary. The truly chilling discontinuity in Britain wascaused by the withdrawal of the late Roman state. The fate of post-imperial Britain is a reminder that the long-term cost of having created an entire social order geared to supporting a world empire may have been more destructive for the inhabitants of a Roman province, once the empire which supported this social order had withdrawn, than were the imagined ravages of barbarian invaders.
Quote ID: 6693
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 265 Page: 14
Section: 1A
Such inter-connectivity marked the arrival in Western Europe of a cultural and religious force which had not existed in the time of the many gods.….
The basic modules of Christianity, also, were remarkably stable and easy to transfer - a bishop, a clergy, a congregation (called in Greek a laos, a “people”; our word for “laity”) and a place in which to worship. Such a basic structure could be subjected to many local variations, but, in one form or another, it traveled well. It formed a basic “cell”, which could be transferred to any region of the known world.
Quote ID: 6694
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 265 Page: 57
Section: 4B
The same process of centralization took place in each province. A metropolis, a “mother city”, emerged as the permanent capital of each region, leaving other cities in the shade. The provinces themselves became smaller.Pastor John’s note: During Diocletian
Quote ID: 6695
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 265 Page: 60
Section: 3C
Yet, only nine years after Diocletian had erected his monument, the emperor Constantine entered Rome on October 29, 312, having defeated his rival, Maxentius…….
A ruthless politician, his first step was to eclipse the memory of Maxentius. He did this by filling the traditional center of the city with monuments which were totally intelligible to old-fashioned Romans (such as the triumphal arch, the Arch of Constantine, which still stands opposite the Colosseum on the road that led to the Forum). These references contained no reference to Christianity.
Quote ID: 6696
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 61
Section: 3C
He occupied Rome in 312. But this did not give him the total power he wanted. Only 12 years later, in 324, did he take over the eastern half of the empire in a series of bloody battles. And he did all this without attributing his success in any way to correct religion toward the ancient gods. It was in this pointed absence of piety toward the gods, as the traditional guardians of the empire, that his subjects came to realize that their emperor was a Christian.
Quote ID: 6697
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 61
Section: 3C
The Council of Nicaea was supposed to be an “ecumenical” – that is, a “worldwide” – council. It included even a token party of bishops from distant Persia. And what Constantine wished from it was uniformity. Even the date of Easter was agreed upon, so that all Christian churches in all regions should celebrate the principal festival of the Church at exactly the same time. This concern for universal uniformity, devoted to the worship of one God only, was the opposite of the colorful variety of religions, of religious festivals each happening in its own place at its own time, which had characterized the empire when it had been a polytheist “commonwealth of cities.”
Quote ID: 6698
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 66
Section: 4B
Exorcism was a common practice in the ancient world. Martyrdom, however, was not. In order to enter into the full shock of the phenomenon in the cities of the Roman Empire, we have to think away later Christian teachings, which has made us take for granted the idea that men and women should die for their beliefs.
Quote ID: 6701
Time Periods: 237
Book ID: 265 Page: 74
Section: 2C
In the late fourth century, polytheism received its modern name. The word “pagan,”paganus, began to circulate among Christians. This word emphasized the marginal status of polytheism. Usually, paganus had meant “second-class participant” – civilian as opposed to regular soldier, lower as opposed to high official. The Spanish priest, Otosius, who wrote his History against the Pagans at the behest of Augustine, in 416, added a further touch to this language of exclusion. Cultivated polytheists, urban notables, and even members of the Roman Senate, were told by Orosius that theirs was a religion of country folk, of pagani, of men of the pagus, of paysans, paesanos – that is, a religion worthy only of illiterate peasants.
Quote ID: 6702
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 265 Page: 75
Section: 3D,4B
When early medieval Christians looked back to Rome, what they saw, first and foremost, was not the “Golden Age” of classical Rome (as we would tend to do). The pagan empire did not impress them. It was the Theodosian Code which held their attention and esteem. It was the official voice of the Roman Empire at its greatest, that is, when it was the Roman Empire as God had always intended it to be – a Christian Empire. The Code ended with a book On Religion. This book, in itself, signaled the arrival of a new attitude to religion. Religious belief as such was now treated as a subject for legislation.
Quote ID: 6703
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 265 Page: 84
Section: 3A1,4B
The splendid late Roman villas, which dominated the countryside in every province of the western empire, spoke of a world restored. Their occupants – part landowners and part government servants – embraced the new order with enthusiasm. For them, conversion to Christianity was a conversion, above all, to the almost numinous majesty of a Roman Empire, now restored and protected by the One God of the Christians.
Quote ID: 6704
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 84
Section: 2A,3A4B
They were Christians, but they had not ceased to be aristocrats. They still needed to celebrate their power. To do this they drew upon ceremonies, art-forms, and literary styles which reached back into the non-Christian past.
Quote ID: 6705
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 265 Page: 85
Section: 3C
Constantinople was not a city without gods. Constantine had deliberately drained the eastern provinces of their pagan art-works so as to turn his new city into an astonishing open-air museum of the art of the classical world. A “post-pagan” world was not, by any means, necessarily a Christian world.
Quote ID: 6706
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 91
Section: 2C
Human beings could not glory. But an institution could do so. What was truly gloriouson earth, for all the imperfections of its individual members, was the Catholic Church. For without
Catholics baptism, Augustine was convinced, it seemed impossible (to human minds, at least) that God would grant forgiveness of the original sin which had made all human beings equal because equally estranged from God. For this reason, the Church had to be truly universal. It was the only resting place, on earth, in which a sorely wounded humanity could hope to recover its lost health.
Quote ID: 6707
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 92
Section: 2C
Augustine deliberately created common ground with his readers, precisely so that, allobstacles removed and all arguments vanquished, they might have no excuse not to slip across that
shared ground in order to become potential citizens of heaven by joining the Catholic Church.
Quote ID: 6708
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 265 Page: 145
Section: 2A4
On February 15, 495, despite previous warning from the pope, a group of Roman senators made sure that the annual purifying ceremony of the Lupercalia was performed at Rome. Once again, naked youths dashed through Rome, as they had done since archaic times. What shocked the pope was that the senators concerned were not pagans. They were good “sons of the Church.” But they were public figures. They knew what Rome needed after an anxious year of epidemics and bad harvests: in their rowdy runaround, the “Young Wolves” – the Luperci- would cleanse the city in preparation for another year. In the city with the longest Christian tradition in the Latin West, collective memory still looked back to the world of Romulus and Remus.
Quote ID: 6709
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 265 Page: 146
Section: 4B
The history of rural church man is often the last act in the long history of the Roman villa. As with the Roman villa, the implantation of a church had economic and social effects. Local markets had always taken place at pagan country shrines on the estates of landowners. Now these shrines were placed by a church.
Quote ID: 6710
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 265 Page: 161
Section: 2E5
What Gregory confronted, in the countryside of Gaul, was not tenacious paganism,surviving unchanged in a peasant world which was untouched by the Catholicism of the cities. What he found, rather, was a world characterized, in a city and country alike, by fertile religious experimentation. Christian rituals and Christian holy figures were adapted by local religious experts to serve the needs of persons who would have considered themselves to be good Christians. It was important, therefore, for Gregory, that reverence for the saints, in its correct Catholic forms, should be seen to touch every aspect of the countryside of Gaul. The saints, as Gregory understood them (and not as persons such as Leubella to know them) must be seen to have been able to meet every local emergency, to account for every local legend, and to be associated with every beneficent manifestation of the sacred.
Quote ID: 6711
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 164
Section: 2E5
These unearthly events were imitations that innumerable holy men and women, dwellers of Paradise, stood ready, in all places, and even in the most out-of-the-way areas, to help Catholic worshipers in their everyday needs. They peopled a landscape that had once seemed opaque to Christianity. Through these many saints, Paradise itself came to ooze into the world. Nature itself was redeemed. Because of his faith in the proximity of Paradise, Gregory allowed sacrality to seep back into the landscape of Gaul. The countryside found its voice again, to speak, in an ancient spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. Water became holy again. The hoof-print of his donkey could be seen beside a healing spring, which Saint Martin had caused to gush from the earth at Nieul-les-Saintes. Trees also regained some of their majesty.
Quote ID: 6712
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 205
Section: 3A1,4B
In 590, Gregory’s fate was sealed: he was made pope. “Under the pretext of becoming a bishop, I have been led back into the world.”….
Quote ID: 6713
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 206
Section: 3A3A,3A3B,3A4C
In the first place, the pope was the city of Rome. The pope fed the city from “the patrimony of Saint Peter.” This patrimony consisted of over 400 estates, located, for the most part, in Sicily (where they covered over one nineteenth of the entire surface of the island). Furthermore, the pope and his colleague, the bishop of Ravenna, were the bankers of the East Roman state in Italy. Only the Church possessed the treasure and the ready money with which to pay the East Roman garrisons and to advance sums of cash to a penniless administration. It was Gregory who had to write, ceaselessly, to remind the emperor of Constantinople and those around him that Italy existed.It was Gregory, also, who had to deal with the Lombards. He negotiated constantly with neighboring Lombard warlords and attempted to contain their aggression by corresponding regularly with the newly created Lombard court of Pavia.
Quote ID: 6714
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 208
Section: 3A3
We have seen what powers in secular life came to be exercised by bishops such as Gregory of Tours in Gaul and by Gregory’s colleagues throughout the eastern Roman empire. Bishops were expected to do anything. On the plateau of Spain, they were responsible for the rounding up of stray horses. In Sicily, at a slightly later time, the bishop of Palermo could even be nominated, by the local governor, as an inspector of brothels.
Quote ID: 6715
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 210
Section: 2C
One could have no illusion as to the skill required to govern such small, cramped groups as a true abbas, a “father.” As abbas, the abbot was truly the “father” of his monks. He was the representative among them of God the Father. His words must work their way, like God’s own leaven, into the soul of each and every monk. To do this required constant vigilance, insight and adaptability.
Quote ID: 6716
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 265 Page: 213
Section: 2C,3A1,3A3
The bishop of Salona (Solun, near Split) was the proud ruler of a “Roman” imperial enclave on the Dalmatian coast. He was a bishop of the old style. He justified his lavish banquet by an appeal to the hospitality of Abraham. Gregory was not amused.“In no way do you give attention to reading the scriptures, in no way are you vigilant to offer exhortation, rather, you ignore even the common norms of an ecclesiastical way of life.”
On his epitaph, Gregory was acclaimed as consul Dei, “God’s consul.”
Quote ID: 6717
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 227
Section: 2C
In 508, Caesarius of Arles set up a convent under his sister, Caesaria. The Rule which he composed for her in 512 became a classic. He brought together an unusually large group of women (200 in all) in a single convent of St. John. He deliberately placed this group in buildings that abutted the walls of the city itself. By their position beside the city walls, they were marked out as the spiritual protectors of Arles, at a time when the city was under constant danger to siege.
Quote ID: 6718
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 243
Section: 2A4
We know of this system from the many little manuals of penance, known as Penitentials, which were necessary for is functioning. The Penitentials consist of lists of sins and their appropriate penances. They are blunt texts. In their description of sins they are nothing if not precise. A single Penitential can range from explosive cases of perjury and bloodshed to the most intimate details of sexual behavior.
Quote ID: 6719
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 265 Page: 261
Section: 2A3
For Gregory the Great, by contrast, and for those who came to share his views in the course of the seventh century, it is as if the Christian imagination had taken on a significantly different tilt. It looked away from this world, so as to peer into the world of the dead. Manifestations of the other world in this world certainly occurred.Pastor John’s note: The lust for power began to extend beyond the bounds of earth. Was this when Christians began to claim power over souls and events beyond the grave?
Quote ID: 6720
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 261
Section: 2A3,4B
Heightened interest in the fate of the souls of average Christians after death caused western Christianity to become, for the first time, an “otherworldly” religion in the true sense. Religious imagination and religious practice came to concentrate more intently on death and the fate of the dead. This happened because leading exponents of the new “culture of wisdom,” such as Gregory and Columbanus, had caught the entirety of human experience in the strands of a single net. All aspects of human life could be explained in the light of two universal principles – sin and repentance. Sin explained everything. Secular rulers exercised their power (so Gregory had said) so as to suppress sin and to encourage repentance. History happened according to the same rhythm. Disaster struck and kingdoms fell because the sins of the people had provoked the anger of God. Prosperity came when the people repented of their sins and regained the favor of God. Even the early medieval economy worked to the rhythm of sin. Massive transfers of wealth to monasteries and great shrines occurred for the “remission” of the sins of their donors. Above all, the human person was seen, with unprecedented sharpness, as made up of sin and merit – and nothing else. And death and the afterlife were where sin and merit would be definitively revealed by the judgment of God.
Quote ID: 6721
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 267
Section: 2E6
In 591, a party of Turks form eastern central Asia arrived at Constantinople. They bore the sign of the Cross on their foreheads.“They declared that they had been assigned this by their mothers; for when a fierce plague was endemic among them, some Christians advised them that the foreheads of their young be tattooed with that sign.”
These Turks had come from what is now Kirgizstan, some 2,300 miles east of Constantinople, close to the borders of modern China. They had learned about the sign of the Cross from the Christian communities which were established along the entire length of the Silk Route, which lead from Antioch, through Persia, to China.
Quote ID: 6722
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 265 Page: 271
Section: 1B
Cosmas’ Christian Topography (written in around 550) was an optimistic tract.….
Cosmas was fortified in these views by a sense of divine providence. Because it was the empire in which Christ had been born, the Roman Empire was destined to last forever. He applied to it the prophecy of the Book of Daniel: The God of Heaven shall set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed (Daniel 7:14).
“The empire of the Romans thus participates in the dignity of the kingdom of Christ, seeing that it transcends as far as can be… any other power and will remain unconquered until the end of time.”
Quote ID: 6723
Time Periods: 16
Book ID: 265 Page: 290
Section: 3F
Not so Muhammad. In 610, at the age of 40, the visions began to come. They came from the One God (in Arabic: Allah), “the Lord of the Worlds.” For the next 20 years, the messages came irregularly, in sudden, shattering moments, up to his death in 632. In them, so Muhammad believed, the same God who had spoken to Moses and to Jesus, and to many thousands of humbler prophets, now spoke again, once and for all, to himself. Vivid sequences of these words from God were carefully memorized by Muhammad’s followers. They were passed on by skilled reciters throughout the Arabic-speaking world. For these were nothing less than snatches of the voice of God himself speaking to the Arabs through Muhammad. They were not written down until after 660, in very different circumstances from the time of their first delivery. When written out, they came to form the single book known to us as the Qur’an.
Quote ID: 6724
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 265 Page: 291
Section: 3F
Jesus had not been God and had never claimed to be treated as if he was God:And behold (at the Last Judgment) God will say: “O Jesus, son of Mary, Didst thou say unto men: Worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God? He will say: “Glory to Thee. Never could I have said what I had no right to say.” ( Qur’ an verse: 119)
Quote ID: 6725
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 265 Page: 329
Section: 3A1,3A4C
This was Adomnan, a descendant of Columba’s kinsmen, who was abbot of Iona from 679 to 704. In his day, Adomnan was the greatest ecclesiastical politician of the northern world. He was one of the few early medieval churchmen who enjoyed sufficient authority to control warfare. In 700, he persuaded 51 kings and 40 churchmen to agree to the Cain Adomnain, Adomnan’s Law, an Ireland-wide Law of Innocents. The Law of Innocents protected women and clerics from the effects of intertribal violence. The ability to create such a law was a sign of the way in which Columba’s spiritual empire had worked its way deep into the fabric of political life in Ireland and beyond.
Quote ID: 6726
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 265 Page: 329
Section: 3A1,4B
Adomnan’s Life of Columba marked the culmination of an age in which great monasteries and ambitious bishops had carved out for themselves extensive ecclesiastical “empires” in Ireland. In the process of empire-building, the monasteries had a distinct advantage. In a world without Roman towns, whose solid walls and long-established populations guaranteed the status of their bishops, great monasteries, such as Iona, were the few fixed points in an ever-changing landscape.
Quote ID: 6727
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 265 Page: 330
Section: 2E3,3A1
In a land without large conglomerations of population, great monasteries were the nearest things to cities. Paradoxically, it was Christian poetry written in Irish that celebrated the pagan high places of Ireland. Many of these had ceased to function for centuries before the coming of Christianity. Only the outlines of their earthworks and the great burial mounds containing prehistoric passage graves survived. But the landscape was still charged with their mute presence. The glories of these places were now evoked, as if they had only recently passed away.….
The bishops and abbots who entered into this competition for the ecclesiastical equivalents of high kingship in Ireland were as intensely aware of their social status as were any of their near contemporaries, the aristocratic bishops of Gaul.
Quote ID: 6728
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 265 Page: 338
Section: 3A1,3A4C
The earthly texture of much of the Old Testament provided Irish Christians with a mirror in which to see their own society more clearly. From the practice of polygamy to the flaunting of the heads of decapitated enemies, there was nothing that happened in “barbarian” Ireland that had not happened in the Old Testament. This meant, in effect, that the blessing of God might rest upon the ways of the Irish as it was known to have rested on the Chosen People of Israel, despite their rough ways. At the very least, the past customs of Ireland could be seen as “their” Old Testament: they were seen as practices suited to a period of preparation for the coming of the Gospels. At best, the existing laws of Ireland could be seen as bringing a touch of the majestic strangeness of ancient Israel into the present day. The classic statement of this view is contained in the great collection of Irish law, known as the Senchas Mar, “The Great (collection of) Tradition.” The “Great Tradition” was put together around A.D. 720. It marked the end of an epoch of extraordinary creativity. It declared the unity of an entire new Christian region. It was a code written for all lawyers in the entire Irish-speaking world. In size and comprehensiveness, no single legal compilation had appeared to equal it in western Europe since the Theodosian Code of 438. In it, the ancient laws of Ireland were brought into the Christian present, by being treated as if they were an adjunct to the Old Testament.
Quote ID: 6729
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 265 Page: 344
Section: 3A4A
He met, in Ethelbert of Kent (580-616), a Saxon king determined to use every asset including the new religion - to maintain his own distinctive, local style of hegemonial overlordship.Ethelbert knew how to control foreigners, lest the world they represented should undermine his own prestige. He had been married for 15 years to a Christian Frankish princess, Bertha. Bertha had been free to practice her own religion, with a Frankish chaplain-bishop. They had been allowed to use a Romano-British church that lay a little outside the Roman walls of Canterbury, on the Roman road which led to the coast. But Ethelbert was in no mood to receive baptism from the Franks, nor, apparently, were they eager to insist on it. They did not want a Christian equal, and Ethelbert had no intention of becoming the spiritual “sub-king” of rulers with hegemonial ambitions that were quite as marked as were his own. To receive baptism from Rome was a different matter.
Pastor John’s Note: Roman Baptism
Quote ID: 6730
Time Periods: 67
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