The medieval church — the thousand years Protestants skip

Ask most Protestants what happened between the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and Luther in 1517 and you will get a shrug, or a vague impression of monks, corruption and darkness. That is a thousand years — half the history of the church — and the shrug is a problem, because the Reformation is unintelligible without it. Luther did not appear in a vacuum. He was a medieval monk, formed by medieval theology, appealing to a Bible that medieval monks had spent a millennium copying by hand.

What the church became when the empire went

The western empire did not fall in a day, but by 476 there was no emperor in Rome, and the administrative machinery that had run the West for centuries was gone. What remained standing, at parish and diocesan level, was the church.

So the church took on the functions nobody else could: courts, famine relief, records, negotiation with whichever army was outside the walls. Gregory the Great, pope from 590, organised the grain supply of Rome and negotiated with the Lombards because there was no one else to do it. This is where a great deal of later trouble begins — a church holding land, courts and armies is a church with something to lose — but at the time the alternative was not a purer church. It was no one.

The monasteries, and why you have a Bible

Antony went into the Egyptian desert around 270; monasticism began, as so much did, in Africa. In the West its decisive form came from Benedict of Nursia, whose Rule of about 529 is a short, strikingly moderate document — enough sleep, enough food, work balanced with prayer, an abbot required to listen to the youngest members of the community.

One clause changed European history: monks were to read, and therefore monasteries needed books, and therefore monks copied them. For a thousand years, in unheated rooms, by hand, they copied the Scriptures, the fathers, and — because Cassiodorus and others argued the classics were needed to understand the Scriptures — Cicero and Virgil and Ovid too.

Europe was a mission field, and the church went

We speak of Europe as Christendom as though it always was. It was not, and the conversion of it was missionary work as difficult as anything in the modern period.

Patrick, a Romano-British teenager taken to Ireland as a slave, escaped, and went back to the people who had enslaved him. Columba sailed from Ireland to Iona in 563; Aidan came from Iona to Northumbria. Gregory sent Augustine to Kent in 597. Boniface, an Englishman, spent the eighth century among the Germans and was killed there. Cyril and Methodius went to the Slavs in 863 and, finding no written language to translate into, invented an alphabet — which is why the Slavic literary languages begin with a Bible.

Not all of it was preaching. Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons included forced baptism and the execution of those who refused, and Alcuin, his own adviser, told him plainly that this was not how faith works. The record contains both, and the honest telling keeps both.

The map changes: Islam

The single largest event in this millennium for the church is one many Protestant histories barely mention. Within a century of Muhammad's death in 632, the Christian heartlands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Persia were under Muslim rule.

Three of the five ancient patriarchates — Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem — were now outside Christendom. The church of Augustine and Tertullian and Cyprian in North Africa eventually disappeared almost entirely, while the Coptic church in Egypt survived and survives still. What is left of the ancient world's Christianity after 750 is a Byzantine east and a Latin west, staring at each other across a shrinking sea.

1054, and the sack that made it permanent

The split between east and west was centuries in the making: language (Greek and Latin), politics (two empires), and two genuine theological disputes — the authority of the bishop of Rome over the other patriarchs, and the filioque, the Western addition to the Nicene Creed saying the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, inserted without an ecumenical council.

In 1054 papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the patriarch excommunicated them back. Both sides at the time regarded it as another quarrel among many.

What made it permanent was 1204. The Fourth Crusade, diverted by Venetian debt and dynastic politics, never reached the Holy Land. It stormed Constantinople instead, sacked the greatest Christian city in the world for three days, desecrated Hagia Sophia and installed a Latin emperor. Eight centuries later, when Pope John Paul II apologised for it in 2001, it still needed apologising for.

The Crusades

Between 1095 and 1291 a series of armies went east. The First Crusade was preached by Urban II at Clermont in response to Seljuk expansion into Anatolia and an appeal from the Byzantine emperor, and it offered something new: remission of penance for those who went.

Jerusalem fell in 1099, and the crusaders massacred much of its population — Muslim, Jewish and, by some accounts, eastern Christian. On the way east, bands attached to the crusade destroyed Jewish communities in the Rhineland, in the first mass antisemitic violence of European history, against the express orders of local bishops who in several cities sheltered Jews in their own houses.

The universities, and Aquinas

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced something genuinely new: the university. Bologna, Paris, Oxford. They were church foundations, staffed by clergy, and their business was systematic argument.

Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, asked in Cur Deus Homo why God had to become man in order to save, and gave the answer Western theology has been arguing with ever since. Thomas Aquinas spent the 1260s and 70s writing the Summa Theologiae, an attempt to state the whole of Christian doctrine in the form of questions, objections and replies — an intellectual method that assumes the strongest form of every objection must be stated before it is answered.

Protestants who have never read Aquinas often assume he replaced the Bible with Aristotle. The Summa quotes Scripture some 25,000 times. He is worth arguing with rather than dismissing, and the doctrine of God he articulated is largely the one the Reformers inherited without noticing.

And the corruption was real

The abuses that produced 1517 are the accumulated product of these centuries, not an invention of the sixteenth.

Money. Church offices were bought and sold. Relics were traded. Indulgences, which began as remissions of church-imposed penance, drifted into a market in time off purgatory.

The papacy against itself. From 1309 the popes lived at Avignon, under French influence. From 1378 there were two popes, and then three, each with cardinals, each excommunicating the others, for thirty-nine years. Any theology that rested on the visible unity of the papacy had to explain that.

The Bible locked up. Scripture existed in Latin, in a translation most people could not read, and vernacular translation was in several jurisdictions a capital offence.

The reformers before the Reformation

Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyon, gave away his property around 1173, had portions of Scripture translated into the vernacular and sent lay preachers out. The Waldensians were excommunicated, hunted for centuries, and survive today.

John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian, argued in the 1370s and 80s that Scripture is the supreme authority, that the church's wealth was indefensible, and that transubstantiation was philosophically incoherent. His followers, the Lollards, produced the first complete English Bible. He died of a stroke in 1384; the Council of Constance had his body exhumed and burned in 1428.

Jan Hus, rector of the University of Prague, taught much the same and was summoned to Constance in 1415 under an imperial safe conduct. He was tried and burned. When Luther was shown at Leipzig that his own arguments matched those condemned at Constance, he thought about it and replied that in that case Constance had condemned the gospel.

So why did 1517 succeed where 1415 failed? Partly the political protection of a German prince. Mostly Gutenberg. Hus was contained because his words travelled at the speed of a manuscript. Luther's travelled at the speed of a press.

What to take from it

The medieval church is not a cautionary tale to be hurried past. It is the church — often corrupt in its leadership, often faithful in its parishes, holding on to Scripture through a millennium in which nobody else would have, and evangelising a continent while doing it.

It is also the standing proof that institutions accumulate rot, that wealth and power do it fastest, and that a church which stops being able to hear correction will eventually be corrected the hard way.

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path" (Psalm 119:105). Somebody copied that verse out by hand, in the cold, so that it would still be there when it was needed.