Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Number of quotes: 68
Book ID: 68 Page: 15/16
Section: 2E1
Lenny Bruce, the Jewish shockmeister, used to send a naughty thrill up the spines of his audiences by professing relief that Jesus wasn’t born in twentieth-century America, because then, Bruce would blithely aver, pious Christians would have to wear tiny electric chairs around their necks. In fact, the cross did not serve as a Christian icon until it ceased being a Roman execution device in the fourth century.
Quote ID: 1808
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 18
Section: 1A
Roman Catholicism remains the central institution of Christianity, not only because of the vast numbers of people -- more than a billion -- who identify themselves as Catholics, but because its dominant institutions -- universal governance, uniform cult -- give it an influence, especially in the West, that no other form of Christianity can approach.3C
Quote ID: 1809
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 68 Page: 79/80
Section: 3C
We are conditioned to think of the decline and fall of Rome sentimentally, as tragedy pure and simple. The gradual dissipation of imperial power, leading to vulnerability before the northern hordes, is the condition only of a new darkness.But what if Roman imperial power itself, not in decline but at the peak, was the real darkness?
Quote ID: 1810
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 80
Section: 3B,4B
...the caesars tolerated, and even admitted to the pantheon, local gods. But the Roman war machine, once set running, was ruthless beyond what the world had seen. And though local gods were left alone, Rome was perhaps the first empire to require of its subjects an at least outward show of assent to the proposition that the emperor, too, was God.{36}
Quote ID: 1811
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 68 Page: 80/81
Section: 3B
We have looked back at Rome from above -- from the point of view, that is, of those who benefited from its systems, traveled its roads, beheld its architectural wonders, learned to think in its language -- but what of that vast majority who drew no such benefit? There is no understanding either the Jesus movement itself or the foundational memory of its violent conflict with the Jews if we cannot look back from below, from the vantage of those for whom the Roman systems were an endless, ever-present horror. It was to them, above all, that the message of Jesus came to seem addressed.Most of the subjugated peoples in the Mediterranean world yielded to the Romans in what Romans regarded as essential, and those who refused to do this found themselves required to yield in everything, surrendering whatever was distinctive in their cultural identities to the dominant occupier. That is why we know so little of the Phoenicians, say, or the Nabataeans.
Quote ID: 1812
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 68 Page: 160
Section: 2A3
The other thing that took us to Cologne were the relics of the Three Kings, the Magi. Their bones were, and still are, enshrined in a triple pyramid of gold caskets on the high altar of the cathedral. How did the dust of Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar come to rest in that far city of Europe and not in Arabia, Mesopotamia, or Babylon? The answer hinges on the medieval politics of relics. Seeking to strengthen his hold on the northern realm, Frederick Barbarossa brought the remains of the Wise Men to Cologne in 1164. The subsequent influx of pilgrims, requiring the building of the new cathedral, lent prestige to the imperial center, solidifying its market and helping it to compete with Mainz and Trier.
Quote ID: 1813
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 167
Section: 4B
But going back to the first century B.C.E., Jews had been exempted from the requirements to offer sacrifices to and utter blessings in the name of pagan gods. When the Church grew apart from the synagogue, Christians lost that exemption, which posed a growing problem as the emperors themselves began, in the third century, to claim the prerogatives of deity. Jews were also exempt from military service, but Christians were not.
Quote ID: 1814
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 68 Page: 171
Section: 1A
When the power of the empire became joined to the ideology of the Church, the empire was immediately recast and reenergized, and the Church became an entity so different from what had preceded it as to be almost unrecognizable.
Quote ID: 1815
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 173
Section: 3C2
Constantine was the instrument of a revolution in the religious imagination of the Mediterranean world, and eventually of Europe. His political impact on Christianity is widely recognized, but his role as a shaper of its central religious idea is insufficiently appreciated.
Quote ID: 1816
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 173
Section: 3C2
...at the time, Constantine was a kind of, well, Moses -- an image I would not presume to apply to him. It originates with Eusebius of Caesarea, his biographer.{1}
Quote ID: 1817
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 68 Page: 173
Section: 3C2
Eusebius (c. 260--c. 339), the bishop of Caesarea, was born before Constantine and died after him. He is sometimes called the father of Church history. The author of several important works, especially History, the earliest telling of the ascendancy of the Church, he is usually a reliable recorder in the mode of Josephus.{2} But his Life of Constantine is a celebration of the divinely ordained union of the Church and the empire -- Constantine as Moses -- and not in any way an objective work of biography.
Quote ID: 1818
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 68 Page: 174
Section: 2E1
Before Constantine, the cross lacked religious and symbolic significance....Water had a vivid hold on the Christian imagination; wood did not.
Pastor John notes: this author’s theme is that the cult of the cross led to hatred of the Jews.
Quote ID: 1819
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
...on the walls of the catacombs in Rome prior to the fourth century were to be seen representations of palm branches, the dove, the peacock, the bird of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus.{9}
Quote ID: 1820
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
Such symbols were ubiquitous in early Christianity, but the cross is simply not to be found among them. Some early Christians signed themselves, touching the forehead, shoulders, and breast, but even that is ambiguous, since, as we saw, Jews were known to make a similar sign.The place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine. “He said that about noon when the day was already beginning to decline” -- this is Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s own report of what he saw in the sky on the eve of battle above the Milvian Bridge -- “he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription CONQUER BY THIS.”{11}
Quote ID: 1821
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
...from Eusebius’s account, not of the vision but of Constantine’s own description of it, the actual “figure of the cross” is clearly what is meant. Constantine put the Roman execution device...at the center not only of the story of his conversion to Christianity, but of the Christian story itself.
Quote ID: 1822
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 176
Section: 3C2
That pivotal 125 years not only illuminates the conflict between Christians and Jews, but escalates it. In the new era, Christians went from being 10 percent of the empire,{16} a despised and violently persecuted minority, to being its solid majority. Christianity went from being a private, apolitical movement to being the shaper of world politics. The status of Judaism was similarly reversed, from a licit self-rule, a respected exception within a sea of paganism, to a state of highly vulnerable disenfranchisement. What might be called history’s first pogrom, an organized violent assault on a community of Jews, because they were Jews, took place in Alexandria in 414, wiping out that city’s Jewish community for a time. Even in Palestine, Jews became a besieged minority. The land of Israel, long ignored by Christians who had happily left it behind for the centers of the empire, now became known as the Christian Holy Land. Christians returned to it, not for the last time, with a vengeance.
Quote ID: 1823
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 68 Page: 178
Section: 3C2
Here we see Eusebius at work not as a historian but as the emperor’s mythmaker....From the start, Constantine wanted to be taken as a man with a mandate from the gods.
Quote ID: 1824
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 68 Page: 180
Section: 3A4,3C
...the Age of Constantine. For him, unification was by definition a matter of domination. And that played itself out in the wars he waged against his rivals. But military domination was only part of his agenda. At a deeper level, he wanted a spiritual domination too, and a fuller sense of that background can help us see his conversion to Christianity in 312 in a clearer light.
Quote ID: 1825
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 180/181
Section: 2B2,3C
...it is significant that Constantine’s coins stated his devotion to the Unconquered Sun. Sol Invictus had already come to be understood, in a proclamation by the emperor Aurelian in 274, as “the one universal Godhead,” as the historian J.N.D. Kelly summarized it, “which, recognized under a thousand names, revealed Itself most fully and splendidly in the heavens”{8}
Quote ID: 1826
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 182
Section: 2B2,3C
The inscription on the Arch of Constantine, which was erected within three years of the battle and still stands near the Colosseum, cites victory only “by the inspiration of the divinity.”{16}
Quote ID: 1827
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 183
Section: 2B2,3C
The potent movement toward monotheism among pagans is reflected in the fact that Summus Deus was by then a common Roman form of address to the deity.{19} As seen in Constantine’s originating piety, that supreme deity would have been associated with the sun, {20} and pagans would have recognized, with reason, their own solar cult in such Christian practices as orienting churches to the east, worshiping on “sun day,” and celebrating the birth of the deity at the winter solstice.
Quote ID: 1828
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 183
Section: 2B2,3C
Indeed, to the Teutons and Celts among them -- and an army mustered from Trier would have drawn heavily from such tribes -- the cross of Christ as the standard to march behind would have evoked the ancestral totem of the sacred tree far more powerfully than it would have Saint Paul’s token of deliverance.{21}
Quote ID: 1829
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 184
Section: 3A4,3C
Thus, while he was ordaining tolerance among religions, he was preparing to abolish tolerance within Christianity. In a letter written in 313, the year of the liberal Edict of Milan, he instructed his prefect in Africa to move against the Donatists, schismatic Christians who posited sanctity as a prerequisite for valid administration of the sacraments. “I consider it absolutely contrary to the divine law,” he wrote, “that we should overlook such quarrels and contentions, whereby the Highest Divinity may perhaps be moved to wrath, not only against the human race, but also against me myself, to whose care He has, by His celestial will, committed the government of all earthly things, and that He may be so far moved as to take some untoward step. For I shall really and fully be able to feel secure and always to hope for prosperity and happiness from the ready kindness of the most mighty God, only when I see all venerating the most holy God in the proper cult of the catholic religion with harmonious brotherhood of worship.”{26}
Quote ID: 1830
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 185
Section: 2B2,3C
That Constantine’s full embrace of a Christian identity -- and of martial sponsorship by the Christian deity -- took place gradually, and not all at once as in the legend, is revealed by the fact that Sol, the pagan sun god, continued to be honored on Constantine’s coins until 321.
Quote ID: 1831
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 187
Section: 3A4,3C
His method was to tolerate diversity and share power for only as long as he had to. The unity of the empire -- under himself -- was to him the absolute political virtue. His string of successful conquests had confirmed its divinely ordained righteousness. So in turning to religion, unity of belief and practice, not tolerance of diversity, had to seem paramount.
Quote ID: 1832
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 188
Section: 3C
Thus Constantine’s political problem opened immediately into his religious one. That led to his -- for our purposes -- most fateful action yet. Immediately upon coming to power as the sole ruler of the empire, but only then, Constantine asserted the right to exercise absolute authority over the entire Church.
Quote ID: 1833
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 188
Section: 3C
Constantine saw, in other words, that only a unified, sharply defined, and firmly advanced Christianity would overcome paganism.
Quote ID: 1834
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 189
Section: 3A4,3C
For Constantine, religious differences were impediments to the power that had replaced Maxentius and Licinius. In this way, the choice (“heresy”) to be religiously different became defined as treason, a political crime.
Quote ID: 1836
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 189
Section: 3C
Thus, the now absolute and sole Caesar, demonstrating an authority no one had ever exercised before, summoned the bishops of the Church to a meeting over which he himself would preside: “Wherefore I signify to you, my beloved brethren, that all of you promptly assemble at the said city, that is at Nicaea...”{40} Two hundred and fifty of them came.{41} He would not let them leave until they had begun to do for the Church what he was doing for the empire. This meeting was the Council of Nicaea, the first Ecumenical Council of the Church.
Quote ID: 1837
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 194
Section: 3C,2E1
It is not my purpose here to deny or establish the authenticity of Constantine’s account, but only to observe that his choice of that first ever council meeting at Nicaea as the place from which to promulgate his vision of the cross as a foundational myth of the church-state and state-church reveals a kind of imaginative genius.
Quote ID: 1838
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 196
Section: 2E3
Perhaps the most visible part of Constantine’s Christianizing program was a hurried campaign to build large and resplendent churches everywhere, a strategy of demonstrating the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
Quote ID: 1839
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 197
Section: 2E1
Saint Cyril, a successor bishop of Jerusalem, writing in 351 to a successor emperor, Constantine’s son Constantius II, connects the dots by tying the Milvian Bridge vision to the discovered True Cross in Jerusalem. “For if in the days of your imperial father, Constantine of blessed memory, the saving wood of the Cross was found in Jerusalem...”
Quote ID: 1840
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 198
Section: 3C2
But in Eusebius’s detailed account of Helena’s progress through Palestine, there is no mention of the True Cross at all, which is a surprise, if only because the emperor himself referred to it (“token of that holiest Passion”) in the same time frame. {8} In describing Helena’s sojourn, Eusebius is concerned just with the uncovering and celebrating of the ancient tomb of Jesus -- the Holy Sepulcher, which to Eusebius is the site of the Resurrection. To him, the Resurrection is what counts. He has no interest in Golgotha, site of the crucifixion. As for the True Cross -- like most Christians, he’d have regarded it as a token of shame, not an object to be sought out and revered. The Resurrection was the point.
Quote ID: 1841
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 198/199
Section: 2E1
There is, one should add, another reason besides theology that Eusebius would have chosen to ignore any report of a recovered True Cross in Jerusalem. As bishop of Caesarea, he was the primate of Palestine....The attention given to Jerusalem by the emperor and his mother had to alarm Eusebius. A shrine containing relics of the True Cross, drawing pilgrims and power, could only undercut the prestige of Caesarea. In the event, with the legend of the True Cross taking hold, Caesarea did fade as the world importance of Jerusalem grew. {9} It was an early lesson in the politics of relics.
Quote ID: 1842
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 199
Section: 2E1,2A3
The cult of Helena would explode in the late fourth century around an elaborately imagined legend -- or rather, set of legends {12} -- that told of her devotion in tracking down not only the True Cross but its nails, the sign Pilate attached to it, various instruments used to torture Jesus, the thorns, the whip, and the Seamless Robe that Jesus wore, a relic to which we will return. How the bodies of the Magi fit into this is not clear, but Helena would also be credited with discovering the site of the Nativity cave in Bethlehem -- relics from womb to tomb.
Quote ID: 1843
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 200
Section: 3D
The one to give first and masterly expression to this legend was Saint Ambrose (339-397), the bishop of Milan. The son of a Roman official, Ambrose had made his first reputation curiously enough, as the provincial governor of Trier. He was a cultured man, educated in the classics, who had been serving as an imperial governor when the people of Milan spontaneously chose him as their bishop -- a signal of the century’s volatile mix of religion and politics.
Quote ID: 1844
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
the victory includes the dawning of a Christian empire, but that has been delayed until now -- delayed, according to Ambrose, by Satan’s surviving agents, the Jews.
Quote ID: 1845
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
The cross itself thus becomes a kind of second Incarnation, a salvific turning point by which the will of God is accomplished. Clever Jews knew the Cross had such power. They hid it over the centuries, not just because it was a proof that they had crucified the Lord, but because its revelation would bring about their final defeat. {19} One version of the Helena legend has a Jew being tortured until he agrees to show her where the Cross is buried.
Quote ID: 1846
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
Ambrose evidently presents Judaism as a force by its nature opposed to Christianity ... and is undoubtedly of the opinion that the emperors should combat Judaism and that the Church and the secular authorities should consider the ruin of Judaism their common cause.” {21}
Quote ID: 1847
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
Brijvers summarizes Ambrose’s argument against the Jews this way: “They thought they had defeated Christianity by killing Christ, but through the finding of the Cross and the nails, as a result of which Christ and Christianity had come to life again, they themselves were defeated
Quote ID: 8163
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 204
Section: 3C2
The result? In 361, a member of the family who had been raised in this pathological culture of holy violence succeeded to the throne. His name was Julian. He was the son of a half-brother of Constantine’s who had been murdered by supporters of Constantine’s sons....Julian tried to overturn the Constantinian revolution. He is remembered as the last pagan emperor, but it is important to note that he was raised a Christian -- he is known as Julian the Apostate. Only after his army had saluted him as the new Augustus did he reveal that he had become a pagan, and that he intended to return the empire to paganism. {27} Given what he had seen in the household of Christianity, why not?
Quote ID: 1848
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 206
Section: 3D
It was only after Julian, through the successive reigns of the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius, that the empire came to be formally proclaimed Christian; only then that Christian heresy was pronounced a capital crime; only then that pagan worship was officially banned; only then that the authority of the Jewish patriarchate was abolished forever....Once church and state had agreed that it was righteous and legal to execute those Christians -- Docetists, Donatists, Nestorians, Arians --who dissented from defined dogma on relatively arcane matters of theology, why in the world should stiff-necked persons who openly rejected the entire Christian proclamation be permitted to live?
Quote ID: 1849
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 207
Section: 3D
In 388, a Christian mob, led by the bishop in Callinicus, a small city on Euphrates, attacked and burned a synagogue, destroying it utterly. They also destroyed the chapel of a Gnostic sect, despite the fact that its leaders had just agreed, under pressure from the emperor Theodosius, to accept Nicene Christianity. So Theodosius ordered the Christians of Callinicus to rebuild the Gnostic chapel and the synagogue.
Quote ID: 1850
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 207
Section: 3D
Still, the action in defense of a Jewish community prompted an immediate and ferocious response from none other than Ambrose. In a direct written challenge to Theodosius -- at whose funeral most of a decade later he would recount the Helena legend -- the bishop of Milan declared himself ready to burn synagogues “that there might not be a place where Christ is denied.” A synagogue, he said, is “a haunt of infidels, a home of the impious, a hiding place of madmen, under the damnation of God Himself.” {36} To order the rebuilding of such a place, once it had been burned, was an act of treason to the Faith.Theodosius yielded, but insisted that the Christians of Callinicus had to restore the sacred articles of worship they had plundered. He would rebuild the synagogue himself. Ambrose rejected this, too. The principle had to be established that the destruction of the “vile perfidy” of Jewish worship was a righteous act, in no way to be punished. Ambrose challenged the emperor to his face, during Mass at the cathedral of Milan. Rosemary Radford Ruether describes the scene: “Coming down from the altar to face him, the bishop declared that he would not continue with the Eucharist until the emperor obeyed. The emperor bowed to this threat of excommunication, and the rioters at Callinicum went unadmonished.” {37}
Quote ID: 1851
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 210
Section: 3D1
In his mile-stone work of theology, The Trinity, Augustine detects the very structure of God’s inner life....like “essence,” “substance,” and “person” as applied to God. “The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind,” he begins, “that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.” {13}
Quote ID: 1852
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 68 Page: 211
Section: 3A2
It was the late Augustine who, no longer depending on the force of reason, justified the use of coercion in defending and spreading the orthodox faith: “For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment),” he wrote in a treatise ominously entitled The Correction of the Donatists, “in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching.” {15}
Quote ID: 1853
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 68 Page: 212
Section: 3A2
The basic theme of The City of God, as Peter Brown puts it, is “that the disasters of the Roman Empire had come not from neglect of the old rites, but from tolerating paganism, heresy and immorality in the new Christian empire.” {17}
Quote ID: 1854
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 68 Page: 213
Section: 3A2
Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, had delivered a series of sermons that ratcheted up homiletic attacks on Jews. Ruether calls them “easily the most violent and tasteless of the anti-Judaic literature of the period.” {18} ....Should we be surprised that not long after these sermons were preached, there were several violent outbursts against Jews in Antioch, with its great synagogue demolished?
Quote ID: 1855
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 68 Page: 239/240
Section: 3A4C
Urban II’s Clermont summons promised rewards in the afterlife, including a guarantee of eternal salvation to those who died in the struggle against the infidel. For the first time in Christian history, violence was defined as a religious act, a source of grace. And, as it had been before, so was suffering.
Quote ID: 1856
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 244
Section: 3A4C
Because it was war undertaken in the name of Christ, an effect of this “peacemaking” was a heretofore unthinkable militarization of Christian religion. Knights formerly dubbed in the halls of castles were now dubbed at the altar. Soon enough, knights would be wearing tonsure, would be bound by the three vows, would be living as monks when not in combat. Bishops would be warriors at the heads of armies. In the Holy Land itself, one French bishop, side by side with the king, would lead an army into battle carrying what he and his followers believed to be Saint Helena’s True Cross. {18}
Quote ID: 1857
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 280
Section: 3H
As Frederick Barbarossa had emphasized his title as Holy Roman Emperor, Innocent III embraces the title Vicarius Christi, Vicar of Christ, marking a shift away from the traditional and, by comparison, modest emphasis on the pope as successor to Peter. {3} Innocent’s was an unprecedented claim to a place “between God and man, lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one.” {4}
Quote ID: 1858
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 282
Section: 3H
The legislation passed by the Fourth Lateran Council put in place the main elements of the Catholic culture as we know it. The seven sacraments, from baptism to extreme unction, were defined. The Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation, equating the communion bread with the real presence of Christ, was promulgated.
Quote ID: 1859
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 282/283
Section: 3H
It was Innocent’s council that first promulgated crucial Church resolutions designed to isolate, restrict, and denigrate Jews. What had until then been merely local indignities were now made universal. For example: “Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province, and at all times, shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other people through the character of their dress.” {11} We can recognize here the precursor of the infamous yellow badge.
Quote ID: 1860
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 306
Section: 3A2A
Here is an edict, issued in 1242 by King James I of Aragon: “Likewise we wish and decree that, whenever the archbishop, bishops, or Dominican or Franciscan friars visit a town or a locale where Saracens or Jews dwell and wish to present the word of God to the said Jews or Saracens, these must gather at their call and must patiently hear their preaching. If they do not wish to come of their own will, our officials shall compel them to do so, putting aside all excuses.” {13}
Quote ID: 1861
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 307
Section: 3A2
Gregory IX took the Chair of Peter in 1227, little more than a decade after the Fourth Lateran Council, which had fired such a resounding warning shot at Jews. It was this Gregory who, with the aptly named constitution Excommunicamus (1231), took the fateful step of establishing the first papal Inquisition.
Quote ID: 1862
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 307/308
Section: 3A2
Gregory ordered the archbishops and kings of Europe, as well as the Franciscans and Dominicans, to expose the secrets of the Talmud, “the chief cause that holds the Jews obstinate in their perfidy.” {18} The University of Paris was especially commissioned for the task.This investigation was a matter not only of uncovering blasphemies -- indeed, certain passages in the Talmud denigrated Jesus and his mother -- but of determining whether rabbinic commentaries were heretical within the context of Judaism. The Church, in other words, was making the unprecedented claim -- “an entirely new development in the Christian theology of the Jew,” Jeremy Cohen calls it {19} -- to moral and theological authority over the content of Jewish belief.
Quote ID: 1863
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 309
Section: 3A2B
The two-sword theory of Saint Bernard was here given its first mature expression, as the king carried out the physical sanction decreed by the spiritual court. The bonfire was lit. The Talmud burned. It would take one and a half days to consume all volumes. {24}
Quote ID: 1864
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 309
Section: 3A2A
The assault on the Talmud came not from a mob but from the established seat, intellectual and ecclesiastical, of Christendom itself. First the crusaders, then Cur Deus Homo. If Anselm had turned God into a slayer of the innocent, now Innocent III, Saint Bernard, and Gregory IX had prepared the way for as much to be done to the Church.
Quote ID: 1865
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 316
Section: 3A2A
In Unam Sanctam, Pope Boniface VIII extends the two-sword theory of Saint Bernard, justifying that state’s use of the temporal sword when it is completely submissive to, and under the judgment of, the spiritual sword wielded by the Church....Unam Sanctam, in its last sentence, repeats the pronouncement of Thomas [PJ: Aquinas] verbatim: “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” {10}
Quote ID: 1866
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 317
Section: 3A2A
Boniface VIII completed the work of his medieval predecessors in reversing that primacy from prince to pope. “Ego sum Caesar,” he would resoundingly declare to his cardinals, “ego imperator!” {14}
Quote ID: 1867
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 317/318
Section: 3A2A
Beginning with the Fourth Lateran Council’s (1215) resolve to eliminate heresy, and Pope Gregory IX’s Excommunicamus (1231), which set up roving Dominican and Franciscan ecclesiastical courts, the early Inquisition had pursued its program intermittently, with no central apparatus. With Pope Innocent IV’s decree (1252), torture was permitted. Boniface VIII’s absolutism (1302) led to the consolidation of both the ideology and the institution. The coming of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, as we shall see, would brace the soul of Europe before becoming planted in Rome itself. The cruelty and narrowness of the Roman Inquisition are linked in the public mind with the Galileo case (1633), but that was tame compared to what had gone before. This unprecedented institution, whose abuses are now roundly denounced by all, {16} intended only to uphold the oneness of the Church.
Quote ID: 1868
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 349
Section: 3H
“Nobody can be saved no matter how much he has given away alms and even if he has shed his blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and unity of the catholic church.” {14}
Quote ID: 1869
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 366/367
Section: 3H
Luther manifested a remarkable sympathy for Jews, and he even averred that Jews had been right to resist Catholic efforts to convert them. “If I had been a Jew,” he wrote in “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” “...I should rather have turned into a pig than become a Christian.” (15)
Quote ID: 1870
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 373
Section: 3A2A
Popes had generally opposed the Spanish Inquisition since its inception, but they had been unable to stop it, or even to temper it. Now, finally, a pope came to see the necessity of allowing a version of the same Inquisition to come to Rome. In 1542, Paul III authorized the establishment there of a Spanish-type Inquisition, which would pursue the agents of doctrinal impurity who were corrupting the Church from within. He appointed as its head the fearsomely ascetic Gian Pietro Caraffa, who had served as a papal nuncio in Spain. “Were even my father a heretic,” Caraffa is remembered as saying, “I would gather the wood to burn him.” {33}
Quote ID: 1872
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 376
Section: 3A2A
What makes Cum Nimis Absurdum a milestone of papal notoriety, though, is less its language than its central ordinance: Jews are to live on a single street, or in a distinctive quarter cut off from other sections of the town or city. This quarter is to have only one entrance. The bull, in other words, mandated that henceforth Jews in Christendom were to live in the ghetto ...Before that bull, however, the ghetto already had a long tradition. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had issued orders isolating Jews, including residence in confined quarters, but such requirements had been irregularly enforced...But never before had a decree ordering the establishment of a Jewish quarter been issued with such seriousness of intent, and never before, as subsequent history would show, was such a mandate to be so rigorously enforced. And never before had such a mandate been issued by a pope.
Quote ID: 1873
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 384
Section: 3A2A
It was Galileo’s intimate nemesis, Urban VIII, who ended the Roman custom according to which a Jew, upon entering the pontiff’s presence, was expected to kiss the Holy Father’s foot. Urban required instead that the Jew kiss the floor on the spot where the pope’s foot had stood. A story told by Jews in Rome had it that Urban VIII intervened when a convert-hungry friar was trying to take a Jew’s child away, to baptize the child. But the Jew refused to let the child go. When the pope heard of it, he decreed that if the Jew did not hand over the one child to be baptized, all of his other children would be taken as well. To make the point, a second of the man’s children was taken, and both were duly baptized. Freed from the ghetto, the first child was then carried through the streets of Rome, to be hailed. {68}
Quote ID: 1874
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 68 Page: 401
Section: 2E1,2A3
Helena, as we saw, is revered for having brought from Jerusalem a nail of the True Cross and relics of Saint Matthias, the apostle elected to replace the traitor Judas. But Helena’s place of honor in Trier is due above all to the Robe of Christ, the tunic attributed to her discovery and preserved in the hidden reliquary of the cathedral.
Quote ID: 1876
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 68 Page: 484
Section: 3A2A
Dollinger railed against Pius IX’s decision in 1867 to raise to sainthood one of sixteenth-century Spain’s notorious grand inquisitors, Don Pedro Arbues de Epilae.
Quote ID: 1877
Time Periods: 7
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