I. CELTIC AND ANGLO-SAXON CHRISTIANITY#
A. Early History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland#
According to Tertullian (Against the Jews 7), there were Christians among the Britons by the end of the second century.
Three British bishops were at the Council of Arles in 314, where they learned the way to date Easter. When the method was revised at Nicaea in 325, however, the new dating did not reach Britain, and the difference became a point of conflict when the new method was introduced later by Roman missionaries.
Ninian (360–432) was the “apostle of Scotland”. Ninian was British, but trained in Rome. He also visited at St. Martin’s in Tours, France, where he was influenced by the idea that a monk should be a missionary. From his base at Whithorn in Galloway, he worked mainly among the southern Picts between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.
Patrick (389–461) was the “apostle of Ireland”. Born into a Christian family in northwest England, he was seized as a youth by pirates and sold in Ireland. After an escape to Gaul, where he learned monasticism, he returned to Ireland as a missionary. Although not the first missionary to the Irish (being preceded by Palladius, who was sent by Pope Celestine in 431 to work among “the Irish believing in Christ”), Patrick laid the basis for the vitality of later Irish Christianity.
Although Christianity had existed earlier in Wales, the region’s patron saint is David (d. c. 601), known for his extreme asceticism and promotion of monasticism.
The withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain in 402 and the invasions of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought a recrudescence of paganism, now in its Germanic form, to Britain. The British Christians, not eager to see their Anglo-Saxon conquerors again in Paradise, showed no concern to take the gospel to them, but the Celtic Christians took great interest in going on missions to the continent.
When Roman missionaries came to England at the end of the sixth century, there were already three expressions of Christianity in the British Isles:
Old Romano-British Christians, pushed back to Wales and Cornwall
Irish Christians, representing a purified and intensified form of Christianity introduced by Patrick
Iro-Scottish Christians, who came from Ireland to Scotland
The term “Celtic Christianity” is sometimes applied to all three, and sometimes only to the Irish form that also spread to Scotland and northern England.
Celtic Christianity, especially as practiced in Ireland, had the following characteristics:
It cultivated the monastic life. The mid-sixth century saw the foundation of a group of important monasteries: Derry (546), Clonard (549), Durrow (c. 553), Bangor (c. 555), Clonmacnoise (554–58), and Clonfert (558–64).
It was associated with clan life. The bishop was a less important figure than elsewhere, being almost superfluous except for performing ordinations. Abbots were the important religious leaders. As an illustration, Armagh, which later was the episcopal center of Ireland, began as a monastery.
It was characterized by missionary zeal. Each Christian should communicate the gospel to others, so they exhibited considerable mobility. Pilgrimage (or wandering) was a penitential duty.
It identified the Christian life with penance. A penitential discipline was in force that was to become more widely observed later. Public confession was known, but a system of private confession with a schedule of satisfactions was worked out.
It had its own date for Easter, distinctive tonsure for monks, and liturgy (in Latin, but preaching was in Gaelic).
Two notable and representative Irish monk-missionaries were Columba (Columcille) (521–97) and Columbanus (543–615).
Columba was educated at the monastery at Clonard in Ireland under Finnian. In 563 the island of Iona off the southwest coast of Scotland became the center of his missionary activity and the spiritual center from which Celtic Christianity spread in Scotland and northern England. From Iona, Aidan was to go to Lindisfarne and missionize Northumbria (635) at the invitation of its king Oswald.
Columbanus was educated at Bangor in northern Ireland and was one of the most learned Latin Christians of his day. Before the Roman missionaries arrived in England, he was missionizing the Germans on the continent. He established monasteries at Luxeuil in eastern France (590) and Bobbio in northern Italy (613) and evangelized the Alemanni around Lake Constance. An independent man, he corresponded with Pope Gregory the Great.
Columbanus brought to the continent Irish penitential books that spread the practice of repeatable private penance. Irish and Welsh monasteries in the fifth and sixth centuries developed a method of discipline that was formulated in the penitentials and later became widespread on the continent. An individual private penitential discipline largely replaced the one-time collective and public discipline of the early church.
According to the newer system confession was made under a seal of secrecy to a priest, who imposed acts of satisfaction that were ordinarily done in private. The penitential books with their scales of penance encouraged a system of equivalent punishments for sins and of commutations of punishment in return for works of satisfaction. Among the disciplines prescribed were reciting the Psalms, fasting, vigils, flagellation, pilgrimages, and monetary satisfactions.
An associate, Gallus, about 612 established a hermit’s cell at a site that became in the eighth century a Benedictine abbey, St. Gall, whose library and school from as early as the ninth century was a center of culture north of the Alps.
The careers of these Irish monks and of Augustine of Canterbury illustrate the fact that before 1100 the missionaries were most often monks (or kings), not the ordinary clergy.
B. The Mission of Augustine to England#
The story was later told that Gregory the Great saw some English youths being sold as slaves and was told that they were Angles (English). So impressed with their appearance, Gregory remarked, “Say not Angli, but Angeli” (not Angles, but angels).
Whatever the origin of his interest in England, a century after the conversion of Clovis to Catholic Christianity, Pope Gregory in 596 dispatched Augustine and forty other monks to England.
Augustine’s party landed in the region of Ethelbert, king of Kent, in southeastern England.
Ethelbert’s spouse was Bertha, the daughter of the Frankish king, great-granddaughter of Clotilda (wife of Clovis), and a Christian.
A Frankish interpreter accompanied Augustine.
Ethelbert permitted them to stay in his realm if they did not use coercion in making converts. He himself was baptized in 597.
The center of Augustine’s work was Canterbury, so he is distinguished from his more famous namesake by the designation Augustine of Canterbury.
The correspondence of Augustine with Gregory gives details of the problems of adapting Roman Christianity to pagans. Gregory’s replies provide classic exposition of the Catholic strategy in missions: What was clearly inconsistent with Christianity was to be destroyed, but what could be taken over or adapted to Christian purposes was to be used in such a way as to provide as much continuity in the religious life as possible. Gregory’s mission policy meant to Christianize holy places and times.
Although Gregory anticipated London and York becoming metropolitan sees, Canterbury retained precedence in the south.
Augustine moved about 602 or 603 to meet with the British bishops. A holy man had told the bishops that if the Romans came in humility they were to be welcomed as men of God, but if they came in pride they were to be rejected. In keeping with his status as archbishop and representative of Rome, Augustine remained seated when the British bishops approached. They accepted this as a sign that they should refuse his demands.
Augustine’s position was that the British Christians should accept the Roman dating of Easter, administer baptism according to the Roman Rite, and join with him in evangelizing the English. The failure of this meeting led to a century of conflict between Celtic and Anglo-Roman Christianity. The failure of the British Christians to evangelize their English invaders proved especially disastrous to their future.
C. Developments in Northumbria#
The king of Northumbria (northeastern England), Edwin, was married to Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert and Bertha, and through her the influence of Christian queens continued. She brought with her to her new home a representative of Roman Christianity, Paulinus, who evangelized the area.
Edwin and his people were baptized by Paulinus. This early missionary work, however, was later either wiped out by the heathen king Penda of Mercia (the large central area of England) or absorbed by the work of the Celtic missionaries.
King Oswy of Northumbria grew up a Celtic Christian. He was being pressed hard by Penda, but won a crucial battle over him in 655. Oswy’s wife, the daughter of Ethelburga, was a Roman Christian, and he called a council in 664 to consider the differences between Celtic and Roman Christianity.
It met at Whitby in the double monastery for men and women founded and led by the remarkable abbess Hilda, who patronized Caedmon, the first known poet in the English language. The spokesman for the Roman side was the monk Wilfrid of York; for the Celtic side, Colman, successor of Aidan at Lindisfarne.
The British and Celtic Christians calculated Easter as the Sunday between the fourteenth and twentieth day of the moon, the Roman Christians on the Sunday between the fifteenth and twenty-first.
The Roman tonsure left the hair in the form of a crown around the head; the Celtic shaved the hair at the front of the head.
Behind the debate over the date of Easter and the proper tonsure for monks, there were more significant cultural differences, so the considerable learning was compromised by sharp acrimony.
The outcome was finally settled by Wilfrid’s remark that Peter possessed the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to which Colman agreed. Oswy would take no chances on offending Peter and decided in favor of the customs of Peter’s successor instead of those of Columba. Thereafter Roman Christianity prevailed in England for centuries.
A second Roman mission to England arrived in 668–69 in the person of Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking follower of Rome who fled west during the Monothelete controversy and was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore gave ecclesiastical organization to the church in England, starting a parochial system and separating the diocesan organization from civil governments. He thus made an English nation in anticipation, but the completion of the church hierarchy with two provinces of Canterbury and York was not accomplished until 755.
Theodore’s associate Benedict Biscop, an Anglo-Saxon monk from Lerins, introduced the Benedictine Rule and founded monasteries at Jarrow and Wearmouth. Intellectual life flourished in the “Northumbrian renaissance” of the seventh and eighth centuries. Greek and Latin were studied, and manuscripts were gathered and copied. By the year 700 European learning was being kept alive largely in the monasteries of Ireland and England, and from there were to come the scholars that lit the fires of the Carolingian renaissance on the continent a century later.
Art found stunning expression in illuminated manuscripts, most spectacular of which are the Lindisfarne Gospels (696–98) and the Book of Kells (c. 800, perhaps prepared at Iona)—with flamboyant colors; intricate patterns; profusion of entwined animal, plant, and human figures; and humorous details characteristic of Celtic art.
The pride and glory of English scholarship and piety was the Venerable Bede (673–735), an almost exact contemporary of John of Damascus. Bede gained such knowledge of Latin that he no longer spoke his native Anglo-Saxon. His commentaries on the Bible show knowledge of Greek available at few places in western Europe at the time. This grandchild of pagans produced impressive exegetical, spiritual, and historical achievements.
Bede is especially remembered for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which exhibits three themes:
Fostering a self-understanding of the varying peoples in England as one English people
Supporting the Roman church and its practices
Providing models of behavior for kings, monks, and bishops that would in turn promote a Christian society
Bede was the first to include in a historical work the BC–AD system of dating worked out by Dionysius Exiguus in the early sixth century. He gives an attractive picture of the Celtic Christians, even though he was a Saxon and came out clearly for the right of the Roman form of Christianity.
Bede did for England what Cassiodorus did for Italy, Gregory of Tours for France, and Isidore for Spain:
Giving the Germanic peoples a sense of identity and of place in God’s purposes
Transmitting classical learning to the Middle Ages by putting it to the service of the church
Providing a basis for a new Christian civilization
II. ANGLO-SAXON MISSIONS ON THE CONTINENT#
The earlier wave of Celtic missionaries was followed a century later by Anglo-Saxon missionaries loyal to Rome. Between 690 and 770 large numbers of Ango-Saxon missionaries went to the continent.
Having been recently converted to Christianity, these missionaries now worked especially, but not exclusively, among their fellow Saxons and related Germanic peoples. They came not so much to put down Celtic Christianity as to preach to those who had not heard and to bring organization to the surviving Christian presence.
Christian territorial losses to Islam in the south and east were partially compensated for by gains in the west and north, beginning with Great Britain and then moving to the continent, whence Christianity spread to northern and central Europe. Two representatives are Willibrord (Clement) and Winfrid (Boniface).
A. Their Strategy#
The Anglo-Saxon missionaries adopted several useful strategies to achieve their goals on the continent.
They placed their work under the pope. They thus established the northern bounds of papal control.
They worked under the protection of local rulers and with the support of the major domo (House Mayor or Mayor of the Palace—something like “prime minister”) of the Frankish kings. This had practical advantages, but it often created barriers before the people whom they sought to convert, for they appeared as agents of an enemy political power.
They offered a direct challenge to the superstitions of the people, whom they sought to impress with the frailty of the pagan gods.
They gave simple, practical catechetical instruction.
They practiced mass conversion, gathering their converts for baptism at Easter or Pentecost.
They organized dioceses with parishes. The Celtic missionaries had paid little attention to diocesan arrangements and had moved freely without political patronage. The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, thought of themselves as restoring the ecclesiastical order of the old Roman Empire.
They instituted auxiliary bishops or revived chorepiscopi (rural bishops).
They established a sprinkling of monasteries that served as anchors for their work.
B. Willibrord (658-739)#
Willibrord (Clement) had studied under Wilfrid, bishop of York in northern England, as well as in Ireland. He went to Frisia (modern Benelux countries) with eleven Saxon comrades in 690.
Although others had preceded him in this area, when he came this was a pagan land beyond the old Roman boundaries, but it had been exposed to the higher culture and religion of the empire. Some Christian communities continued after the Roman legions departed, so in those cases there was some Christian knowledge, but this was not true among the native Frisians, where syncretism abounded.
Willibrord’s main base was at Echternach (Luxemburg), but the outpost at Utrecht (Netherlands) eventually became the archepiscopal headquarters. The Frisian mission was given a severe setback by an uprising against the Franks, but the region was converted by 784 through the efforts of Charlemagne, under whom Alcuin wrote the life of Willibrord.
C. Winfrid (673-754)#
We know the career of Winfrid (Boniface) from his biography by Willibald and his own correspondence. Born in Wessex (a West Saxon), Winfrid at seven was placed in the monastery at Exeter as an oblate. Dissatisfied with the meager library there, he removed to the monastery at Nutsall near Winchester where he remained until he was forty. Then he went on a mission to the Frisians where he worked briefly under Willibrord.
After a visit to Rome, where his name was changed to Boniface, he was sent by Pope Gregory II to work in Thuringia and Hesse. A second visit to Rome was followed by further mission work among the Saxons. A famous incident was his demonstration of the impotence of paganism by cutting down an oak tree sacred to the god Thor at Geismar and using the wood to build an oratory dedicated to St. Peter at Fritzlar.
Boniface’s missionary work included reorganizing and restoring church life in the former border areas that had been devastated by the barbarian invasions. His principal monastic establishment was at Fulda (744), organized on the Benedictine model. For most of his career as bishop (appointed in 722 by Gregory II) and archbishop (appointed in 732 by Gregory III) he had no fixed see, but from 747 he made Mainz his headquarters, and Mainz later became the largest bishopric in Europe.
Boniface’s reform efforts included active involvement in the councils of the Frankish realm. These were a combination of civil diets and ecclesiastical synods that issued capitularies with the force of both church canon law and civil law.
The second of these German councils (the first was in 742), held at Estienne in what is now Belgium in 743 or 744, took an important step in the development of feudalism. The king was allowed use of lands to which the church retained the title and received in return a nominal rent. This practice provided a precedent for the concept of a fief — the grant of a use of property, but with military service given in return instead of rent.
The Council at Soissons in 744 is the first council that dated itself from the birth of Christ. Boniface was made the head with the other bishops under him; there was to be an annual synod of the bishops. Since cities were few, the dioceses were large and divided into many parishes; the priests were to remain in their parish and be visited by the bishop once a year. The choosing of the bishops belonged to the Merovingian House Mayor.
Some of the capitularies, drawn from various councils between 742 and 747, illustrate life of the times and the difficulties faced by the church:
Money that had been appropriated from the churches by rulers was to be restored, but this principal concern of the councils proved to be overly ambitious.
The clergy were not to carry weapons or fight—they often went to war with relics, shouting “Hallelujah” and praying antiphonally.
Celibacy was required of the clergy, not uniformly attained.
Monks were obliged to live by the Benedictine Rule.
Bishops were not to keep falcons.
Priests were to use only oil consecrated by the bishop, an effort to maintain a symbol of unity under the bishop.
There was to be a suppression of syncretism, which was a problem in this shadowland of Christendom.
Boniface returned to Frisia in 753. He was martyred in 754 while preparing converts for baptism. He and his co-laborers made no resistance to their pagan attackers.
In his work, Boniface tied the knots that held together the ecclesiastical structure in the Frankish realm and its adjoining lands to the north, but he was never successful in mission work among the Saxons.
III. THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN THE WEST#
A. Charlemagne’s Predecessors: Pippin and the Papacy#
Charles Martel, House Mayor of the Merovingian king, was remembered for two things:
Halting the Muslim advance (733) into France
Secularizing church property in order to finance his enterprises
The Carolingian dynasty takes its name from him. Charles Martel died in 741 and was succeeded in his position by his sons Carloman and Pippin. The next decade and a half was to be a decisive turning point in western political and religious history.
In 747 Carloman for religious reasons retired to a monastery, leaving his brother Pippin (Pepin) III the Short the sole ruler in fact as the House Mayor to Childeric III, the last of the “do-nothing” Merovingian kings. In the same year a Frankish council sent requests on canon law to Pope Zachary, marking the first overture of Frankland to Rome and the restoration of relations with the papal see after a period of decay.
Pippin sought the royal dignity, so he sent a delegation in 751 to Rome with an inquiry concerning the situation in France, where the one who had the title of king had no real royal authority. Pope Zachary replied “that it would be better that he who actually had the power should be called king rather than him who held the title without the royal power.” Childeric was sent to a monastery and Pippin was elected king.
Pippin desired a more direct papal confirmation of his authority, and in 754 Pope Stephen II went north to bestow a personal papal anointing on Pippin and his two sons at the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris. Anointing gave the Frankish king a Christian holiness as an epiphany of Jesus Christ in place of the inherited pagan holiness.
It is possible that earlier Visigothic and Merovingian kings were anointed, but express mention of anointings in 751 and 754 was probably due to the usurper Pippin’s desire to legitimate his kingship. Thereafter kings at their anointing and on ceremonial occasions wore vestments that were essentially ecclesiastical. They were anointed with the holy oil used in the consecration of bishops; their sword, scepter, ring, and crown were blessed. No wonder the kings thought of themselves as having a sacred character and as set above bishops and priests.
Stephen II proclaimed Pippin and his sons “patricians of Rome” with responsibility to protect Rome from the Lombards, and in return Pippin declared the Byzantine corridor of land between Rome and Ravenna as belonging to the papacy. Actually the land was neither Pippin’s to give nor the pope’s, but the eastern emperor’s, but the excuse was that he had failed to give adequate defense. The “Donation of Pippin,” later repeated by Charlemagne, changed the private papal lands, the “Patrimony of Peter,” into papal civil jurisdiction, “the Republic of St. Peter.”
The papal state represented the coming together of several elements:
The estates left to the church
The administrative achievements of individual popes in Rome
The theory that Rome belonged to the pope since the “donation of Constantine”
The view that the pope as representative of the emperor had prerogatives in the Byzantine corridor in Italy
What had been taking shape for some time was now given a larger legal recognition.
In 751 Ravenna fell to king Aistulf of the Lombards, the last of the Germanic invaders of Italy. They replaced the Byzantine power in Italy save for the extreme south and the Rome-Ravenna corridor. The Byzantine emperors were pursuing an iconoclastic policy (the iconoclastic Council of Hiereia met in 754) and so were considered heretical in Rome. Besides, they were harassed by the Muslims and so could not offer protection to Italy. Pippin sent expeditions against the Lombards to relieve their pressure from the north and the south on Rome. In 752 Zachary, the last Greek pope, died.
So, by 754, the year of Boniface’s death, the West was looking to Rome, and Rome had turned away from Byzantium to look to the Franks. Stephen II was the last effectual representative of Roman imperial power in the West, and when he arrived in Gaul in 754 to anoint Pippin, he represented the spirit of what was to be medieval Western Christendom.
Certainly the year 754 was significant for religious as well as political history:
The papacy turned from Byzantium to the Franks, now governed by a new dynasty
The papal states as a legal entity came into existence
The papal anointing gave a sacred character to kingship
Pippin III died in 768 and was succeeded by his sons Carloman and Charles, to be known as “Charles the Great.” On Carloman’s death in 771, Charlemagne became sole ruler. He sought a Frankish-Roman Empire inspired by Augustine’s City of God.
Concurrently with the Iconoclastic controversy, the pope in 754 turned from the East to the West for political and military support. In 800 Charlemagne was viewed in the West as the true successor to the Roman emperor. The Franks, culminating in Charlemagne, snatched western Europe from decline and brought a brief cultural revival, the Carolingian Renaissance.
B. Military-Missionary Expansion under Charlemagne (768-814)#
Charlemagne captured Pavia in 774 and became king of the Lombards as well as king of the Franks. He renewed concessions to the pope, now Hadrian, who began to mint coins in his own name and to date documents according to the year of his pontificate, sure signs of political independence from the Byzantine emperor. Charlemagne annexed Bavaria in 787 and began its ecclesiastical reorganization. He pushed his borders south of the Pyrenees and secured the allegiance of the surviving Visigoths in northern Spain (788). Frisia was conquered by 790.
Charlemagne’s principal foe was the Saxons. He conducted eighteen military expeditions into Saxon land over thirty-three years. Many missionaries had labored among them with little success, for the Saxons remained loyal to Germanic religion. They continued to raid Frankish territory.
A capitulary of a council from 781 or 785 concerning Saxony made the baptism of infants under one-year of age obligatory, enforced by the death penalty for hiding a child (the death penalty was common for many offenses). Such legislation made failure to baptize one’s child a sign a paganism.
Peace was finally achieved after 10,000 Saxons were transplanted to Frankish soil and Frankish settlers colonized Saxony.
An insight into the Christianity that emerged among the Saxons is provided by the Heliand (“The Healing One”). It was composed in the first half of the ninth century by a Saxon in the old Saxon language at the request of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. Known as “The Saxon Gospel”, since it is a retelling of the four Gospels in epic poetry, the Heliand presents a synthesis of Christianity and the Saxon warrior society.
Employing terminology and concepts familiar to his hearers, the poet-monk speaks of Jesus’ disciples as his “warrior companions”
Highlights the virtue of loyalty to the chieftain (thus contributing to the later picture of Christian knighthood)
Juxtaposes fate with the biblical God
Borrows from magic (for example, stressing the performative power of words and shifting the emphasis in the sacraments from the working of God to the effectiveness of the elements themselves).
Missionaries set about Christianizing the Avars, a Mongolian/Turkic people who settled in the Danube basin.
Except for isolated incidents, Jews lived peacefully and prosperously, and Charlemagne and his successors protected them.
C. Ecclesiastical Organization and Practices under Charlemagne#
Charlemagne took it into his hands not only to missionize without, but also to organize the church within. Charlemagne, holding a sacral kingship by reason of his divine anointing, was viewed as a new David or a new Josiah, who, like those Old Testament kings, supervised the religious as well as the secular life of his territories.
A chief concern of the Carolingian church was for order, and this meant a stable hierarchy loyal to the crown. Charlemagne’s chief advisor, Alcuin, addressed him as “David” at court. There was a mixing of sacerdotal and kingly power.
Decrees affecting the church were issued not as decisions of bishops but as capitularies from the ruler.
Missi dominici (a lesser noble and a cleric) were sent out to keep check on frontier regions.
Bishops and abbots, especially under Charlemagne’s successors, became vassals of the king and their offices were benefices bestowed by the ruler.
Charlemagne had Augustine’s City of God read to him each night, but he seems to have understood it in terms of using the state to submit the world to the church. The two powers, royal and sacerdotal, were now confused. Not even the bishop of Rome opposed the emerging arrangements.
The term “archbishop” had been in use for patriarchs and bishops who were special representatives of the pope, but it now began to be used for the metropolitan bishops (bishops of important sees such as provincial capitals), who received the pallium (a white woolen shoulder piece) from the pope as a sign of being his deputy.
Eight new dioceses were formed during Charlemagne’s reign. There were supposed to be annual synods of bishops under their archbishop, but Charlemagne preferred pan-Frankish synods in which there was no distinction between bishop and archbishop. At the end of his reign there were in his territories twelve French archbishops, five Italian, and four German.
There was now firmly in place a network of local parishes, which became more important as the old city-based organization of the church was no longer possible in the primarily agrarian economic and social system that had emerged.
Each parish had its own cemetery and baptistery.
No church was to be consecrated without the presence of holy relics (reviving a provision of a council at Carthage in 401 that relics be placed in altars).
Although clergy had worn special clothes — at least while celebrating the liturgy — since the fourth or fifth century, distinctive clothing for them was now required at other times in order to discourage their presence at brothels and taverns under the anonymity of lay dress.
A distinctive feature of the Carolingian period was the development of canonical clergy at cathedrals. A cathedral (from the Greek kathedra “chair,” by way of Latin) was the church of the bishop, where he had his “seat.” Previously, there were two types of clergy:
The “secular” clergy, who lived in the world (saeculus) and performed pastoral duties in the parishes
The “regular” clergy, ordained persons who lived as monks by a monastic rule (regula)
The “canonical” clergy combined both features, serving parish responsibilities in the world but living according to a rule.
The chief of the cathedral clergy was the bishop himself, but from the ninth century sometimes a dean was chosen to assist the bishop in the administrative affairs of the diocese, and archdeacons were appointed by regions to oversee the financial administration for the dean and archpriests. In collegiate churches (larger parish churches where there were several priests), a provost (a kind of secular abbot) or an arch-priest led the clergy.
The great Saxon monastery at Corvey (modeled on the French monastery at Corbie) was established, comparable to Fulda in importance. Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) aimed at greater uniformity of customs among monasteries by reforming them according to the Rule of Benedict of Nursia. It was made the standard for monastic houses in the West by Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, thereby giving the idea of a “family” of monasteries that later influenced the Cluniacs and Cistercians.
Several unmarried and widowed women of the Frankish nobility founded convents and became their abbesses. In the next century Dunstan (909–88), as abbot of Glastonbury and then archbishop of Canterbury, brought English monasticism into line with Benedict’s rule. Monasteries averaged 70 to 150 members. Corbie was exceptional in reaching 300 members.
A copy of the canon law was received from Rome, the Dionysio-Hadriana, based on the collection of Dionysius Exiguus and supplemented by Pope Hadrian.
Under Pippin and Chrodegang the Roman liturgy and chant began to be introduced into France.
In 785 Pope Hadrian sent to Charlemagne’s court in Aachen a copy of the Gregorian Sacramentary.
It was reworked by Alcuin, using some Gallican elements.
This liturgical rite, which had passed from Rome to Gaul, in its modified form came back to Rome.
The resulting Gallic-Roman Rite purported to be Roman but actually contained a large admixture of Gallic elements. It largely replaced the other Western liturgical rites. The goal of greater uniformity in monastic regulations, canon law, and liturgy was associated with materials received in France from Rome.
Good order included regulation of the religious life of the people: baptizing their children at birth, abstaining from work on Sunday, confessing sins and communing three times a year, and tithing. Baptism was “christening” (making one a Christian), which included giving one a “Christian” name under the sponsorship of godparents, who now became a part of one’s kinship for reckoning the degrees within which marriage was forbidden.
During the eighth century in the administration of baptism, triple immersion of the newborn was normal, but affusion (the pouring of water over the head of the candidate) began a long process of replacing immersion in the West not only in cases of sick-bed baptism (in which it was normal) but as the ordinary practice. Baptism was supposedly administered soon after birth, but unless there was an emergency it was delayed until Easter or Pentecost.
Education in the Christian life often left much to be desired: Jonas of Orleans in the first book written On the Lay Estate (820) lamented that so many of the laity thought that—because they had been christened—no matter how they lived they could not be lost and would face only purgatorial fire. In contrast, he offered the opinion that the unbaptized who lived well would be better off than the baptized who lived in wickedness.
The economic basis of the church was regularized and strengthened by the state levying and collecting tithes. Besides tithes, churches received offerings and bequests and earned rent from its properties. The tithes were divided into four parts: one for the bishop, another for the clergy, the third for the poor, and the fourth for rebuilding churches.
The intellectual and literary activity of the Carolingian age resulted in the first manuscripts in musical notation (called neumes), dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, elaboration of liturgical music, and the first anticipations of polyphonic melody. Treatises on music continued earlier practice of treating the subject theoretically and not dealing with its actual performance. Congregational participation in the liturgy was already much reduced; in larger churches choirs carried the chant.
The Byzantine court gave an organ to Pippin in 757 and another to Charlemagne in 812. The organ was used in Byzantium only in court functions, not in the liturgy, and it would seem the same was true in Aachen. Organs were used on ceremonial occasions also at the great monasteries, variously dated between the Carolingian age and sometime around 1000, and then at the introduction and conclusion of the service.
The first use of church bells seems to have been in North Africa and Gaul in the sixth century. They were employed by Celtic missionaries in the seventh century and became more common in the Carolingian period. Bells announced the hours for prayer, calling the faithful to pray and chasing the demons away.
Pagan practices still survived among the people, especially elements of magic, sorcery, and astrology. Clergymen made an effort to Christianize customs by substituting the “Our Father” and the Apostles’ Creed for incantations, and consecrating trees and fountains to saints.
Pious practices that had begun earlier and became characteristic of the Middle Ages, such as the cult of relics and pilgrimages, are attested in Carolingian times, as are their attendant abuses.
The desire for relics was the occasion for their theft.
Pilgrimages (St. Martin of Tours was the most popular site in France) brought moral temptations, so that some tried to discourage women from making the journeys.
Bishops were great builders of civic as well as ecclesiastical structures. Modifications of the early Christian basilica, which would prepare the way for Romanesque architecture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, began to occur. On a different, centralized, plan was the cathedral at Aachen—sixteen sides with an octagonal dome. Its design was inspired by the octagonal church of San Vitale at Ravenna. The cathedral was built 794–98 and consecrated by Leo III in 805.
D. The Establishment of Schools and the Intellectual Renaissance#
The late eighth and ninth centuries in the West are called the Carolingian renaissance. The return to some measure of political stability and security, with added encouragement from Charlemagne and his court, permitted some revival of intellectual life that had suffered greatly on the continent in the wake of the barbarian invasions. Charlemagne directed every monastery and diocese to conduct a school, but this was difficult to enforce.
Moreover, Charlemagne surrounded himself with capable men, drawing scholars from other countries—Spain, Italy, and especially Britain—to promote the spread of learning in his territories. This interest in education had as a special goal that pastors and people be able to understand the Scriptures. The premise was that right knowledge was a prerequisite to right acting.
Latin Bibles were the most frequently copied books of the period. With Charlemagne’s encouragement, scholars at various centers labored to provide a reliable text of the Vulgate. A new form of writing, the Carolingian minuscule script, emerged. Glosses to manuscripts of the Psalter provided prototypes for the twelfth-century Glossa Ordinaria to the Bible as a whole.
Paul the Deacon prepared a collection of sermons from the Church Fathers, arranged by scriptural texts and according to the liturgical year, to serve as models for use all over the realm.
Many “lives of saints” were also produced. These works drew on classical traditions of biography and funeral orations, but included legendary material about miracles with the purpose of exalting the virtues of the saint and promoting Christian living in the readers.
Prior to schools under court patronage, there had been three kinds of schools in Christendom: monastic, episcopal or cathedral (designed for the recruitment of clergymen for the diocese), and in some cases parish. Only in Italy had lay grammar teachers continued to teach for fees. Alcuin wrote the first known catechism, Questions and Answers for Children. Alcuin made the court of Charlemagne at Aachen a center of learning, and he later became head of a monastic school at Tours. He had previously been master of the school in York that was begun by its archbishop Egbert, a pupil of Bede.
In antiquity the teacher had no social standing, but in Christianity in this period the teacher was a holy man, a cleric and learned. For the Germanic peoples the teacher was a revered figure, and there was an awe for books, especially since they were in the venerable language of Latin, which stood for cultural antiquity and was the language of redemption.
Instruction followed the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity:
The Trivium of grammar (including philology, literature, and literary criticism)
Rhetoric (letter writing, preaching, and the art of convincing)
Dialectic (logic, and later the whole of philosophy)
The Quadrivium (not pushed to any extent) of astronomy (so as to calculate the date of Easter)
Music (ecclesiastical)
Arithmetic (for church accounts)
Geometry
The prominence of dialectics in the curriculum contained the germ of later Scholasticism.
The basic requirements of priests were to know the creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, the Mass, the sacramentary (prayers) and lectionary (Scripture readings), church music, and the homilies of the Fathers.
The principal categories of literature produced in the preceding three centuries available for study were commentaries on the Bible, theological treatises, saints’ lives, historical works, treatments of the liberal arts, calendars, encyclopedias and compendia, and collections of laws.
E. Theological Developments and Controversies#
The theological controversies of the age of Charlemagne and his successors were related to the nature of Jesus Christ and the church and were argued in terms of the correct interpretation of tradition.
Some church leaders on the Iberian peninsula in the late eighth century, notably Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo, and Felix, bishop of Urgel, taught a Christology that their opponents Beatus and Alcuin labeled as “Adoptianism”, not to be confused with the early Christology of “Adoptionism”. The name came from a characterization of the teaching stating that the Son of God by nature adopted the son in his humanity.
Charlemagne’s theologian Alcuin wrote the major refutation, Against Felix, in which he insisted that it was doctrinally more exact to speak of the divine Christ assuming human nature (homo assumptus) rather than adopting a son (filius adoptivus). The Iberians’ Christology was actually based on Philippians 2:6–7, the self-emptying of the Son of God. Their view was condemned as heretical — both at the Council of Frankfurt in 794 called by Charlemagne, and by Pope Leo III in 798.
The addition of the filioque clause (affirming that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son) to the Nicene Creed, adopted at Toledo in 589, was added to the Gallic liturgy under Charlemagne. Pope Leo III ordered it omitted from the Roman liturgy rather than alienate the Greeks further, and it was not added in Rome until the eleventh century.
The Second Council of Nicaea, 787, in opposing the Iconoclastic movement, made a distinction between lawful veneration to images and adoration that belonged to God alone. When the decisions of the council were translated into Latin, this distinction was confused.
Since no Frankish bishop was at the council, Charlemagne said the council was not ecumenical. He commissioned a theologian, probably Theodulf of Orleans, to produce the Libri Carolini (“Books of Charlemagne”) that stated a fairly common Western view on religious art as suitable for instruction and decoration, but not for worship.
The Council of Frankfurt in 794 repudiated the decree of the Council of Nicaea II, in spite of the latter having papal endorsement and so ultimately prevailing as official policy. The religious art of the Carolingian period reflected the empire’s renewed cultural contacts, drawing on Italian and Byzantine art as well as on Celtic and Germanic art.
F. Charlemagne’s Coronation as Emperor#
On Christmas day, 800, Pope Leo III in Rome crowned Charlemagne as emperor. A plausible reconstruction is that both Charlemagne and Leo III had something to gain from the event. Charlemagne strongly desired the imperial title, but he had to deal with a pope who was under suspicion of adultery, did not want himself to be judged by any, and wanted his enemies banished for treason.
Charlemagne’s understanding was that he would receive the crown in return for accepting the pope’s oath of his innocence without a trial, which he did. In earlier times a new emperor was acclaimed and then the crown was bestowed. What Charlemagne did not foresee was Leo converting the crowning into the constitutive act so that the acclamation became a “spontaneous” approval by the people in the church. That change in the meaning of the event, so that the imperial title was the gift of the pope.
Charlemagne and the pope held two different conceptions of empire that would contend for supremacy in subsequent centuries: Did the emperor have a supervisory role over the church, or did the pope make (and so could unmake) emperors?
In the background to the crowning of Chalemagne was Irene’s seizure of power in Byzantium in 797. Since a woman alone was not considered properly to hold the imperial title, the West could interpret the situation as being that the imperial throne was vacant. The Byzantines, however, reacted negatively to the crowning of Charlemagne. Finally, a compromise was negotiated whereby the emperor Michael I in 812 recognized Charlemagne as his brother with rule in Italy except for Venice and the surrounding region. As for Charlemagne, he evidently saw himself as a new Constantine.
The coronation of Charlemagne is often described as the beginning of the “Holy Roman Empire.” Such terminology is anachronistic.
The intention by the participants was to elect a new emperor in the existing empire. Charlemagne was already king of the Franks and king of the Lombards. In addition, in the eyes of those who elected him, he was now emperor in the existing Roman Empire. He acquired a new dignity, but he did not become the emperor over any new land.
IV. LATER CAROLINGIAN CULTURE AND ITS PROBLEMS#
The ninth century saw the beginning of a disintegration of the unified empire and culture Charlemagne had sought to achieve. In that setting occurred controversies affecting church organization and theological questions in which a few men of notable learning showed the results of the preceding educational revival.
A. Political Background#
If Charlemagne had not had his son Louis the Pious (814–40) raised to the purple before his death, the title of emperor would have died with Charlemagne. The influence of the clergy over his actions gave Louis his nickname. According to his father’s wishes, he crowned himself, but he permitted his coronation to be repeated by the pope, Stephen IV, who also gave him the first imperial anointing, at Rheims in 816. Thereafter the two rituals of anointing and crowning were often combined.
The Constitutio romana (824) spelled out the relations of emperor and pope.
The emperor had supreme jurisdiction, while the pope as a local ruler was to exercise ordinary judiciary and administrative power in his territories.
The pope was to be chosen by the Roman people without constraint.
The emperor was to confirm his election, and before his consecration he was to take an oath of loyalty to the emperor.
The pope had the right to crown and anoint the emperor.
Louis’s sons — Lothair, Louis the German, and Pippin — had been sub-kings under their father. In 840 Lothair claimed the whole realm, but the situation was complicated by the ambitions of Charles the Bald, son of Louis by a second spouse. The result at Verdun in 843 was the division of the realm three ways, a settlement that foreshadowed later political divisions in Europe:
Charles the Bald ruled the west (France)
Lothair the middle region (including Italy)
Louis the German the east (Germany)
The title of emperor remained a personal rank.
Churchmen maintained the clerical idea of a “Christian empire,” and Carolingian churchmen advanced important ideas on political theory. The Anglo-Saxon Catwulf stated the view that as there are two natures in Jesus Christ, so there are two natures in society, the body politic and the body ecclesiastical. This has remained until modern times a good Anglo-Saxon view, but it declined as the Carolingian realm disintegrated.
Smargeus in Royal Way speaks of unction giving the king a sacramental power so that he becomes an adoptive son of the king of heaven.
Jonas, bishop of Orleans, in writing on the Royal Institution affirms that royal power is from God, not lineage; even an unjust ruler is to be obeyed as God’s chastisement on his people.
Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, On the Authority of Kings, insists that bishops are superior in that they consecrate kings, but are not consecrated by them.
When Pope John VIII crowned Charles the Bald in 875, developing the thought that the consecrated king is an imitation of the true king, Christ, he declared that what Christ possesses by nature the king possesses by grace, words that would echo in future coronations. Such treatments of political theory advanced the idea of divine kingship in the West.
B. The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals#
Ecclesiastical problems in ninth-century Gaul centered around the authority of bishops over against archbishops.
Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims (845–82), was trying to promote unity and found the bishops to be a decentralizing force.
The popes had favored the revival of archbishops, but now became afraid of the archbishops having too much power and found it to their advantage to strengthen bishops against both kings and archbishops.
The date of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals is uncertain, perhaps as early as the eighth century (c. 774–78) or as recent as about 850. The alleged compiler was Isidore Mercator (a pseudonym), perhaps intended to be associated with Isidore of Seville. One purpose of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals was to show the popes as defenders of bishops against their metropolitans. There were other forgeries of a similar kind at this time, but this collection became the most influential forgery in the history of the Roman Catholic church. It became the basis of the claims for the papal monarchy in the later Middle Ages.
fter the preface there are four parts to the collection:
Papal communications (all forgeries) — fifty “Apostolic Canons,” and sixty decretals from Clement of Rome (the Pseudo-Clementine literature is used as apostolic) to Miltiades.
“Donation of Constantine” — the legend that Pope Sylvester healed and converted Constantine, who then moved his capital to Constantinople and gave rule over the West to the pope, from whom he received the imperial crown, had been widely accepted in Rome in the late fifth century and had circulated in an eighth-century forgery in connection with Stephen’s anointing of Pippin.
It is easy to ridicule this devoutly believed story, but the legend points to the actual result of the emperor’s move of the capital to Constantinople.
Canons of councils from Nicaea to the seventh century, mostly authentic.
Letters of popes (forty of which are apocryphal) from Sylvester (d. 335) to Gregory II (d. 731).
The overall effect of the collection was to give a legal basis for papal authority over the jurisdictional structure of the church. The “Donation of Constantine” had the further significance of giving a basis for the claim that the pope is supreme over all rulers, even the Roman emperor.
C. Pope Nicholas I the Great (858-67)#
Nicholas I, who was involved in the dispute with the Eastern church over the election of Photius as patriarch and over jurisdiction of missionary work among the Slavs, was the first pope to make use (perhaps innocently?) of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
He did so in forcing Hincmar to recognize the right of the papacy to intervene in his dispute with a bishop, whose cause Nicholas upheld.
Nicholas also suppressed the claims of John of Ravenna to a patriarchal title and jurisdiction.
Moreover, Nicholas established a precedent for papal interference in politics, on this occasion on moral grounds, in forcing king Lothair II to take back his first wife.
D. Controversy over the Lord’s Supper#
The first eucharistic controversy occurred in the mid-ninth century.
Paschasius Radbertus (d. c. 860) wrote the first doctrinal monograph on the Lord’s supper, On the Body and Blood of the Lord (831, revised 844). Radbertus was a monk and later abbot at Corbie. He made a realistic identification of the eucharistic body with the human body of Jesus Christ that was born of Mary, was crucified on the cross, and is miraculously multiplied on the altars of Christendom at the consecration of the bread and wine. The elements become nothing less than the flesh and blood of Christ under the figure of bread and wine regardless of the faith of participants—a faith which is necessary, however, for spiritual blessings to be received.
Charles the Bald commissioned Ratramnus (d. c. 868), another monk at Corbie, to reply. Ratramnus opposed the realistic interpretation of the bread and wine, saying that the body and blood of Jesus Christ are present in a figure, not literally. The spiritual presence of the body of Christ is a mystery, available only to faith. As the elements nourish the human body, the spiritual reality nourishes the soul. The Holy Spirit works in the bread and wine to bring spiritual blessing even as he does in the baptismal waters.
In the background of this discussion were two different traditions of interpreting the words of Jesus at the Last Supper and in John 6.
Ambrose had set forth a metabolic view of the Lord’s supper in which by consecration the sign becomes the reality.
Augustine made a subtler distinction, maintaining the symbolism of the sign and the realism of the supernatural invisible gift.
By the time of Bede the two views were brought together synthetically, using the terms of both.
Accordingly, both Radbertus and Ratramnus assumed that both Ambrose and Augustine agreed, for it was assumed that there was no contradiction in the tradition, but each of the former men interpreted each of the latter men according to the perspective of the other. Over time, the position espoused by Radbertus gained ground, especially in popular piety.
F. Gottschalk and Predestination#
A son of a Saxon count, Gottschalk (c. 804–c. 869) was brought as an oblate (a child “offered” to a monastery) to Fulda to be educated. Louis the Pious had ordered that an oblate at maturity could choose whether to stay in monastic life, but Gottschalk had entered under Charlemagne, when oblates did not have this privilege. A Synod at Mainz (829) apparently allowed him to leave Fulda, but did not release him from his monastic vows and required that the property given by the father remain with the monastery.
During several years as a wandering monk and preacher, Gottschalk defended an extreme form of double predestination. Believing he had really understood Augustine, Gottschalk said God elected some to eternal life and assigned the reprobate to eternal fire. This was because of God’s decree, not because of God’s foreknowledge.
Synods at Quiercy in 849 and in 853 (the latter under Hincmar) condemned Gottschalk’s doctrine and affirmed that God elects only to life, that free will lost in Adam is restored in Jesus Christ through baptism, that God intended the salvation of all, and that Christ died for the sins of all, not just the elect.
A council at Valence in 855, on the other hand, upheld double predestination. Gottschalk himself, however, died still condemned. The varying responses to his teaching showed that strict Augustinianism was still alive, although most held back from many of its implications.
F. Rabanus Maurus and John Scotus Eriugena#
Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856) was a participant in the discussion of the eucharist and an opponent of Gottschalk. He moved in the highest circles of influence in the Carolingian world: student of Alcuin, abbot of Fulda, archbishop of Mainz, and teacher of some of the outstanding Carolingian scholars (so much so that he was known as the “teacher of Germany”).
Rabanus Maurus was especially influential through his commentaries on the books of the Bible, drawn from patristic works and presenting allegorical interpretations applied to Jesus Christ and the church.
When the Irish discipline of private penance spread and many different penitentials were compiled, some champions of a public and more rigorous discipline, although acknowledging that it had fallen into disuse, objected. Rabanus Maurus took a middle way and advocated public confession for public sin and private confession for secret sin. He was representative of the traditional scholars and churchmen of the age, quite in contrast to John Scotus Eriugena.
John “the Scot” (c. 810–c. 877), an Irishman (his name means “Erin born”) who went to the continent and enjoyed the patronage of Charles the Bald, was the one outstanding original thinker of the ninth century in the West. As a master of Greek (knowledge of Greek remained longer in Celtic areas than in Gaul), he translated the works of Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin.
John Scotus Eriugena developed his own philosophical system that was later suspected of pantheism because of its attempted reconciliation of Neoplatonic emanation with Christian creation. His work De Divisione Naturae divided nature into four categories:
Nature that is not created but creates (God)
Nature that is created and creates (the Platonic ideas)
Nature that is created and does not create (the natural order that is perceived through the senses)
Nature that is not created and does not create (God, to whom all things return)
V. SUMMARY#
Different models were present
The Irish monk-missionaries worked on their own and offered an individual holy person as the center of loyalty.
The Benedictines let a monastery serve as a Christian center.
The Carolingians used ecclesiastical structures to promote political unity.
The Byzantines allowed “national” churches with their own language to provide cohesion among new converts.
The popes planned an independent episcopal organization united by allegiance to Rome. The three popes Gregory sought to avoid the extremes of imposing counsels of perfection on new converts or settling for superficial conversion. However, their adapting Christianity to the pagan pattern of religious thinking and behavior resulted in a folk catholicism within a church with a more learned leadership.
Greek missionaries had the advantage that political pressure and cultural superiority from Byzantium led barbarian rulers in Moravia, Bulgaria, and Russia to request Christian teachers to instruct them. Missionaries in the West, although often enjoying political support, usually took the initiative in entering new areas. The Byzantine leadership put more stress on doctrine, whereas the popes stressed morals and loyalty to Rome. All the missionaries emphasized the weaknesses of the pagan gods and the advantages of accepting Christianity.
During the seventh through ninth centuries the building materials for medieval Europe were assembled. The Carolingian age laid the groundwork for a medieval European civilization whose bond of unity was to be religious rather than political. The damage done by the Germanic invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries was partially reconstructed.
A revival of learning associated with the establishment of schools brought with it the copying of manuscripts and renewed theological activity. The Carolingian age set the contours for the religio-political map of Europe for some time to come.
A blending of the character of political and religious offices occurred. The institution of sacral kingship and a revival of a Roman emperor in the West crowned by the pope gave a holy character to civil rule. On the other hand, civil jurisdiction by the papacy was advanced with the creation of the papal states.
The revival associated with the Carolingian age, however, was soon threatened by a new wave of invaders, this time from Scandinavia.