A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

When the swift triumph of Islam had cut off from Christendom the populations among whom its creed had been evolved, that creed ruled in the Byzantine State; in Italy, still half-imperial, half-Lombardic; in Spain, then under Teutonic masters; in Frankish Gaul; in parts of southern Germany; in Saxon Britain, of which the conversion was begun by the lesser Augustine under Gregory the Great, after the overthrow of the earlier Church by the heathen invaders; and in Ireland, which had been largely Christianized in the fourth and fifth centuries, apparently by Greek or eastern means. In the Moslem world, Christianity existed on sufferance, and chiefly in heretical forms, being Nestorian in Persia and Monophysite in Egypt, as also in Abyssinia; but Christian Europe was now nominally agreed on the main official dogmas.

In the more civilized European States, specific paganism still throve more or less obscurely, both by way of educated antiquarianism and of peasant persistence in old ways; and the Church framed canons against the latter and treatises against the former. The mass of the population, however, was satisfied with the ample elements of the old system embodied in the new. In the more barbaric States, Christianity was even less of a modifying force than in the others. Like the people of the empire, the barbarians carried on their pagan rites, festivals, and superstitions under the name of Christianity; and whereas the educated world was in a measure forced by its pessimists and its pietists to recognize the difference between its documents and its practice, the more primitive races simply translated Christian tradition and theory into the terms of their own life. Save for an exaltation of celibacy, and a confessional inquisition, at once prurient and puerile, into the details of the sexual relation, it in no way changed the plane of their thought and conduct. What it did alter was their political life, inasmuch as the co-ordination of the priesthood made everywhere for the power of the prince, if he had the wit to use it, the Church being everywhere shaped as far as might be on the model and the ideal set up by Constantine.

Wherever the Roman empire had been, unless anti-Christian violence has intervened, the Church system to this day bears witness to the union of Church and State. In France, for instance, there is still a bishop, as a rule, wherever there was a Roman municipality, and an archbishop wherever there was a provincial capital; and where in imperial territory there were variations in the administration of rural districts—some being under their own magistrates, some under those of neighbouring towns—the Church system varied similarly. In the East, rural bishops, or chorepiscopi, were common; but in the West they seem to have prevailed only in the Dark Ages, the general tendency being to give the rank of mere priests to the holders of country benefices, and to make bishops the rulers of dioceses from an urban seat or “cathedral” church. Country parishes, on the other hand, were formed into groups, presided over by an archipresbyter, without episcopal rank. The spirit of imperial rule pervaded all Church life. Where large landowners under the Christian emperors had sought to resist the centralizing system by appointing the priests on their own estates, they were compelled to obtain the approval of the nearest bishop; and when they sought next to do without priests, a law was passed forbidding laymen to meet for worship without an ecclesiastic. This principle was carried wherever the Church went, and rigid subordination was the general result. To secure stability, however, the Church had to rest on a recognized economic interest throughout the priesthood; and the early practice of a communal life for the bishop and his clergy, which was still common in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, was gradually broken up. The competition of monasticism first forced upon all a stricter rule; and priests living in their bishop’s house became known as canonici regulares, “canons regular,” or under rule—a duplication of terms, since “canon” originally meant “rule,” and “canonical” was simply “regular.” But the obvious financial advantages, as well as the liberties of the unattached priests, soon made their status the aim of all not devoted to the monastic ideals. The change was furthered by the habit of leaving endowments to individual churches and to individual offices; till at length, even in the cathedral towns, the canons lived apart, each with his own revenue, though often dining at a common table; while the country priests necessarily became still more their own masters in the matter of income. Thus arose the “secular clergy,” the title of “regular” being restricted to those who lived under a monastic rule—as that of Benedict or that of Augustine; and these in turn came to be classed with monks as distinguished from the others. In addition, there sprang up in the Middle Ages a number of unattached or itinerant priests, as well as private chaplains.

In every order alike, however, an economic interest was sooner or later the ruling motive. Beneficed priests wrought for the church under which they had their income, keeping as much of it as they could, but recognizing the need for official union; and the monastic orders in their turn grew wealthy by endowments, and zealous in proportion for the temporal power of the Church. As always, the self-denying and devoted were a minority; but the worldly and the unworldly alike wrought everywhere in the political interests of the kings, who had established and endowed the Church to begin with, and who in return were long allowed many liberties in the appointment and control of bishops and priests. A common result was the appointment of lay favourites or benefactors of the king; and bishoprics seem almost as often as not to have been in some degree purchasable. The Church, in short, was a social and political function of each State, with the papal system loosely and variably co-ordinating the whole.

§ 2. Methods of Expansion

Every extension of the Church being a means of power and revenue to priests, the process was furthered at once by motives of selfishness and by motives of self-sacrifice. In some cases the latter were effectual, as when a pious hermit won repute among barbarians for sanctity, and so acquired spiritual influence; but the normal mode of conversion seems to have been by way of appeal to chiefs or kings. When these were convinced that Christianity was to their interest, the baptism of their more docile subjects followed wholesale. Thus ten thousand Angli were claimed as baptized by Augustine in Kent on Christmas Day in the year 597—a transaction which reduced the rite to nullity, and the individuality of the converts to the level of that of animals. In this case there can have been no rational consent. A little later, Heraclius in the East caused multitudes of Jews to be dragged to baptism by force; and the same course was taken in Spain and Gaul. Jews so coerced were only more anti-Christian than before; and wholesale relapses of barbarian converts were nearly as common as the wholesale captures, till the cause of kings won the mastery. Nowhere does the Church seem to have grown from within and upward among the barbarians as it had originally done in the empire: the process is invariably one of imposition from without and above, by edicts of kings, who supported the missionaries with the sword. As at the outset of the Church, there were deadly strifes among the pioneers. The earlier British Church having been formed under influences from Ireland, there was such utter hatred between its remnants and the Romanized Church set up by Augustine that, apparently after his death, twelve hundred monks of the older church were massacred at Bangor in one of the wars between the two Christian parties; and the Britons, not unnaturally, refused to have any intercourse with their brethren, regarding them as worse than heathens. The Englishman Boniface, who played a large part (720–55) in the Christianization of northern Germany, and who in the usual fashion claimed to have baptized a hundred thousand natives in one year, secured the excommunication of several rival bishops of the anti-Roman school; and those who would not accept re-ordination at his hands he sought to have imprisoned or flogged, denouncing them, in the style of the Churchman of all ages, as “servants of the devil and forerunners of Antichrist.” His authority was established in new districts at the head of an armed force; and when with fifty priests he met his death (755) in Friesland at the hands of heathen natives, he was marching with a troop of soldiers. Even where force was not used, the persuasions offered were of the grossest kind. Thus a friend of Boniface is found advising him to point out to the heathen that the Christians have the bulk and the best of the world, possessing all the rich lands which yield wine and oil, while the pagans are now confined to the coldest and most barren regions. No religion was ever more unspiritually propagated.

Under Charlemagne, Christian missionary methods left those of Islam in the rear. For the subjection of the still free Saxons, between the Baltic and the borders of Thuringia and Hesse, he needed the aid of the Church’s organization; and they, realizing the state of the case, for the most part refused to be baptized. In his wars with them, accordingly, he decreed that those who rejected the gospel should be put to death. As the wars lasted thirty-three years, the number of the slain must be left to imagination. The survivors were finally bribed into belief by a restoration of their local rights, and by being freed from tribute to the king. They do not seem, however, to have been freed from the exactions of the Church, which, according to the testimony of Charlemagne’s adviser, Alcuin, had been a main cause of the exasperation of the Saxons against it. Among those exactions Alcuin mentions not only tithes—which had now become a recognized form of Church revenue—but the infliction of many penalties for moral and ecclesiastical offences. Such exactions the monarch endorsed; and he it was who enforced the payment of tithes.

King and priest were thus natural allies as against the freemen or the chieftains in each territory; and the advance of the Church was bloody or bloodless according as the king was able to enforce his will. In the Scandinavian countries the founding of Christianity was a life-and-death struggle, lasting in all for some two hundred and fifty years (820–1075), between the local liberties, bound up with pagan usages, and the centralizing system of the Church. Again and again the Church was overthrown, with the king who championed it; and the special ferocity of the marauding vikings against Churchmen wherever they went seems to have been set up by their sense of the Church’s monarchic function. The fact that many priests were ex-serfs made them the more obnoxious; and they in turn would strive the more zealously for the Church’s protecting power. But the Church’s political work did not end with the humbling of the vikings, as such, at the hands of the kings who finally mastered them; it endorsed the aggressive imperialism of the Danish king Knut as it had done that of Rome; and never till the time of the Crusades does the ostensible universality of the Church seem to have checked the old play of racial hatreds and the normal lust of conquest. So clearly did Charlemagne realize the political use of the Church that, while he imposed it everywhere in his own dominions, he vetoed its extension to Denmark, where it would be a means of organizing a probably hostile power, many of the stubborn Saxons having fled thither. From the moment of its establishment it had been stamped with the principle of political autocracy; and only when its own mounting power and wealth made it a world-State in itself did it restrain, in its own interest, the power of kings. In the earlier stages, king and Church supported each other for their own sakes; and it was as a political instrument, whose value had been proved in the Roman Empire, that the Church was sooner or later accepted by the barbarian kings. All the while popes and prelates complained bitterly that many of the converts thus won were baptized and rebaptized, yet continued to live as heathens, slaying priests and sacrificing to idols. When, however, open heathenism was beaten down, the combined political and religious prestige of the Christian priest gave him a hold over the multitude, forever superstitious, such as those of the heathen times had never wielded save in Gaul. To the new regal tyranny was added that of the Church. When the Servians, who had been nominally Christianized under the rule of Byzantium in the eighth century, regained their independence in the ninth, they significantly renounced Christianity; and only after re-conquest were they again “converted.” To this day their old pagan beliefs abound under cover of Christianity.

To the general rule of propagation by regal edict or by bloodshed there were a few partial exceptions. Vladimir, the first Christian king of the Russians (980), destroyed the old monuments and images in the usual fashion; but under the auspices of his wife, the sister of the Byzantine emperor, Greek missionaries set up many schools and churches, and the kingdom seems to have been bloodlessly Christianized within three generations. It accordingly remained Christian under the two and a half centuries of Mongol rule, from 1223. Elsewhere the conversion of the Slavs was a process of sheer monarchic violence, as in Scandinavia. Always it was the duke or king who was “converted,” and always his propaganda was that of the sword. Through three reigns (870–936) heathen Bohemia was bedevilled by dukes who coerced their subjects with the Church’s help; a pagan prince who led a successful revolt, but was overthrown by a German invasion, lives in history as Boleslav the Cruel; and an equally cruel successor, who with German help used the same means on behalf of Christianity, figures as Boleslav the Pious (967–999). The same process went on in Poland; the converted duke (967), backed by his German overlords, seeking to suppress pagan worship with violence and meeting violent resistance. So among the Wends, who were also under German vassalage, the missionary was seen to be the tool of the tyrant, and the cause of paganism was identified with that of national independence. After generations of savage struggle, Gottschalk, the pious founder of the Wendish empire, was overthrown (1066) and put to death with torture. So in Hungary, where king Stephen (997–1038) combined slaughter with better propaganda, the king’s death was followed by a desperate pagan revolt, which was twice renewed under his son.