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Logan approaches the Church from a northern European perspective. This is evident in interpretations as well his organization of the materials. Christianity was, however, a Mediterranean religion.

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The Church reflects this fact, though the Latin Church's ties to northern Europe have obscured this reality to a considerable degree, especially as a result of the Protestant Reformation. As the Latin Church has moved away from its eastern roots, its history has become more separated from the eastern Churches. The western Church even up to the fifteenth century remained much more conscious of its relationship to the eastern Churches than was the case after the Reformation.

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Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. These bishops considered themselves the successors of those apostles. The year , however, is a rather artificial division. Even in the West, where imperial political control gradually declined, distinctly Roman culture continued long afterwards; thus historians today prefer to speak of a "transformation of the Roman world" rather than a "fall of the Roman Empire. With the Muslim invasions of the seventh century, the Western Latin and Eastern Greek areas of Christianity began to take on distinctive shapes. In particular whereas the bishops of the East maintained clear allegiance to the Eastern Roman Emperor, the Bishop of Rome, while maintaining nominal allegiance to the Eastern Emperor, was forced to negotiate delicate balances with the "barbarian rulers" of the former Western provinces.

Although the greater number of Christians remained in the East, the developments in the West would set the stage for major developments in the Christian world during the later centuries. After the Italian peninsula fell into warfare and turmoil due to the barbarian tribes, the Emperor Justinian I attempted to reassert imperial dominion in Italy from the East, against the Gothic aristocracy. The subsequent campaigns were more or less successful, and an Imperial Exarchate was established for Italy, but imperial influence was limited.

The Lombards then invaded the weakened peninsula, and Rome was essentially left to fend for itself. The failure of the East to send aid resulted in the popes themselves feeding the city with grain from papal estates, negotiating treaties, paying protection money to Lombard warlords, and, failing that, hiring soldiers to defend the city. As the political boundaries of the Roman Empire diminished and then collapsed in the West, Christianity spread beyond the old borders of the Empire and into lands that had never been under Rome. Beginning in the fifth century, a unique culture developed around the Irish Sea consisting of what today would be called Wales and Ireland.

In this environment, Christianity spread from Roman Britain to Ireland, especially aided by the missionary activity of St.

A History of the Church in the Middle Ages : F. Donald Logan :

Patrick with his first-order of 'patrician clergy', active missionary priests accompanying or following him, typically Britons or Irish ordained by him and his successors. Soon, Irish missionaries such as Columba and Columbanus spread this Christianity, with its distinctively Irish features, to Scotland and the Continent. One such feature was the system of private penitence, which replaced the former practice of penance as a public rite. Although southern Britain had been a Roman province, in the imperial legions left the isle, and the Roman elite followed.

Some time later that century, various barbarian tribes went from raiding and pillaging the island to settling and invading. These tribes are referred to as the "Anglo-Saxons", predecessors of the English. They were entirely pagan, having never been part of the Empire, and although they experienced Christian influence from the surrounding peoples, they were converted by the mission of St.

Augustine sent by Pope Gregory the Great. The majority of the remaining British population converted from Christianity back to their Pagan roots. Contrary to popular belief, the conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity was incredibly slow. The Anglo-Saxons had little interest in changing their religion and even initially looked down upon Christianity due to conquering the Christian British people decades earlier.

It took almost a century to convert only the aristocracy of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity with many still converting back to Paganism. After this, the common folk took a few hundred more years to convert to Christianity and their reasoning for converting was in large part due to the nobility. Soon Anglo-Saxons started to incorporate their old Pagan stories and figures into Christianity, such as the Pagan god Woden becoming sixteenth in descent from 'Sceaf, Noah's son in the Bible. Soon, important English missionaries such as SS.

Wilfrid , Willibrord , Lullus and Boniface would begin evangelising their Saxon relatives in Germany. The native inhabitants were persecuted until the Frankish King, Clovis I converted from paganism to Roman Catholicism in Clovis insisted that his fellow nobles follow suit, strengthening his newly established kingdom by uniting the faith of the rulers with that of the ruled. Willibrord established a church in Utrecht. Much of Willibrord's work was wiped out when the pagan Radbod, king of the Frisians destroyed many Christian centres between and In , the English missionary Boniface was sent to aid Willibrord, re-establishing churches in Frisia and continuing to preach throughout the pagan lands of Germany.

Boniface was killed by pagans in Iconoclasm as a movement began within the Eastern Christian Byzantine church in the early 8th century, following a series of heavy military reverses against the Muslims. Sometime between — the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian ordered the removal of an image of Jesus prominently placed over the Chalke gate, the ceremonial entrance to the Great Palace of Constantinople , and its replacement with a cross. This was followed by orders banning the pictorial representation of the family of Christ, subsequent Christian saints, and biblical scenes.

In Leo's realms, the Iconoclast Council at Hieria, ruled that the culture of holy portraits see icon was not of a Christian origin and therefore heretical. The iconoclastic movement itself was later defined as heretical in under the Seventh Ecumenical council , but enjoyed a brief resurgence between and The Carolingian Renaissance was a period of intellectual and cultural revival during the late 8th century and 9th century, mostly during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.

There was an increase of literature , the arts , architecture , jurisprudence , liturgical and scriptural studies. The period also saw the development of Carolingian minuscule , the ancestor of modern lower-case script, and the standardisation of Latin which had hitherto become varied and irregular see Medieval Latin. To address the problems of illiteracy among clergy and court scribes, Charlemagne founded schools and attracted the most learned men from all of Europe to his court, such as Theodulf , Paul the Deacon , Angilbert , Paulinus of Aquileia.

The cracks and fissures in Christian unity which led to the East-West Schism started to become evident as early as the fourth century. Cultural, political, and linguistic differences were often mixed with the theological, leading to schism. The transfer of the Roman capital to Constantinople inevitably brought mistrust, rivalry, and even jealousy to the relations of the two great sees, Rome and Constantinople.

It was easy for Rome to be jealous of Constantinople at a time when it was rapidly losing its political prominence. Estrangement was also helped along by the German invasions in the West, which effectively weakened contacts. The rise of Islam with its conquest of most of the Mediterranean coastline not to mention the arrival of the pagan Slavs in the Balkans at the same time further intensified this separation by driving a physical wedge between the two worlds.

History of the Church in the Middle Ages

The once homogenous unified world of the Mediterranean was fast vanishing. Communication between the Greek East and Latin West by the s had become dangerous and practically ceased. Two basic problems — the nature of the primacy of the bishop of Rome and the theological implications of adding a clause to the Nicene Creed , known as the filioque clause — were involved. These doctrinal issues were first openly discussed in Photius's patriarchate. By the fifth century, Christendom was divided into a pentarchy of five sees with Rome accorded a primacy.

The four Eastern sees of the pentarchy, considered this determined by canonical decision and did not entail hegemony of any one local church or patriarchate over the others. However, Rome began to interpret her primacy in terms of sovereignty, as a God-given right involving universal jurisdiction in the Church. The collegial and conciliar nature of the Church, in effect, was gradually abandoned in favour of supremacy of unlimited papal power over the entire Church.

These ideas were finally given systematic expression in the West during the Gregorian Reform movement of the eleventh century. The Eastern churches viewed Rome's understanding of the nature of episcopal power as being in direct opposition to the Church's essentially conciliar structure and thus saw the two ecclesiologies as mutually antithetical. For them, specifically, Simon Peter's primacy could never be the exclusive prerogative of any one bishop.

All bishops must, like St. Peter, confess Jesus as the Christ and, as such, all are Peter's successors. The churches of the East gave the Roman See, primacy but not supremacy. The Pope being the first among equals, but not infallible and not with absolute authority. The other major irritant to Eastern Christendom was the Western use of the filioque clause—meaning "and the Son"—in the Nicene Creed. This too developed gradually and entered the Creed over time. The issue was the addition by the West of the Latin clause filioque to the Creed, as in "the Holy Spirit Indeed, the councils, which drew up the original Creed, had expressly forbidden any subtraction or addition to the text.

In addition to this ecclesiological issue, the Eastern Church also considered the filioque clause unacceptable on dogmatic grounds. Theologically, the Latin interpolation was unacceptable since it implied that the Spirit now had two sources of origin and procession, the Father and the Son, rather than the Father alone.


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Photios was refused an apology by the pope for previous points of dispute between the East and West. Photius refused to accept the supremacy of the pope in Eastern matters or accept the filioque clause. The Latin delegation at the council of his consecration pressed him to accept the clause in order to secure their support. The controversy also involved Eastern and Western ecclesiastical jurisdictional rights in the Bulgarian church, as well as a doctrinal dispute over the Filioque "and from the Son" clause.

That had been added to the Nicene Creed by the Latin church, which was later the theological breaking point in the ultimate Great East-West Schism in the eleventh century. Photius did provide concession on the issue of jurisdictional rights concerning Bulgaria and the papal legates made do with his return of Bulgaria to Rome. This concession, however, was purely nominal, as Bulgaria's return to the Byzantine rite in had already secured for it an autocephalous church. Without the consent of Boris I of Bulgaria , the papacy was unable to enforce any of its claims.

It was the first major division since certain groups in the East rejected the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon see Oriental Orthodoxy , and was far more significant.

The Church After the Fall of the Roman Empire

Though normally dated to , the East-West Schism was actually the result of an extended period of estrangement between Latin and Greek Christendom over the nature of papal primacy and certain doctrinal matters like the filioque , but intensified by cultural and linguistic differences.

The "official" schism in was the excommunication of Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople, followed by his excommunication of papal legates. Attempts at reconciliation were made in by the Second Council of Lyon and in by the Council of Basel , but in each case the eastern hierarchs who consented to the unions were repudiated by the Orthodox as a whole, though reconciliation was achieved between the West and what are now called the " Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. Both groups are descended from the Early Church, both acknowledge the apostolic succession of each other's bishops, and the validity of each other's sacraments.

Though both acknowledge the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy understands this as a primacy of honour with limited or no ecclesiastical authority in other dioceses. The Orthodox East perceived the Papacy as taking on monarchical characteristics that were not in line with the church's traditional relationship with the emperor.

The final breach is often considered to have arisen after the capture and sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in Crusades against Christians in the East by Roman Catholic crusaders was not exclusive to the Mediterranean though see also the Northern Crusades and the Battle of the Ice. The sacking of Constantinople , especially the Church of Holy Wisdom and the Church of the Holy Apostles , and establishment of the Latin Empire as a seeming attempt to supplant the Orthodox Byzantine Empire in is viewed with some rancour to the present day.

Many in the East saw the actions of the West as a prime determining factor in the weakening of Byzantium. This led to the Empire's eventual conquest and fall to Islam. In , Pope John Paul II extended a formal apology for the sacking of Constantinople in ; the apology was formally accepted by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. Many things that were stolen during this time: From the 6th century onward most of the monasteries in the West were of the Benedictine Order. Owing to the stricter adherence to a reformed Benedictine rule , the abbey of Cluny became the acknowledged leader of western monasticism from the later 10th century.

Cluny created a large, federated order in which the administrators of subsidiary houses served as deputies of the abbot of Cluny and answered to him. The Cluniac spirit was a revitalising influence on the Norman church, at its height from the second half of the 10th centuries through the early 12th.

The next wave of monastic reform came with the Cistercian Movement. The keynote of Cistercian life was a return to a literal observance of the Benedictine rule , rejecting the developments of the Benedictines. The most striking feature in the reform was the return to manual labour, and especially to field-work. Inspired by Bernard of Clairvaux , the primary builder of the Cistercians, they became the main force of technological diffusion in medieval Europe.


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By the end of the 12th century the Cistercian houses numbered , and at its height in the 15th century the order claimed to have close to houses. Most of these were built in wilderness areas, and played a major part in bringing such isolated parts of Europe into economic cultivation. A third level of monastic reform was provided by the establishment of the Mendicant orders. Commonly known as friars, mendicants live under a monastic rule with traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience , but they emphasise preaching, missionary activity, and education, in a secluded monastery.

Beginning in the 12th century , the Franciscan order was instituted by the followers of Francis of Assisi , and thereafter the Dominican order was begun by St. The Investiture Controversy , or Lay investiture controversy, was the most significant conflict between secular and religious powers in medieval Europe. The end of lay investiture threatened to undercut the power of the Empire and the ambitions of noblemen for the benefit of Church reform.

The Catholic Church was plagued by corruption and scandal in the late Middle Ages. In order to increase revenue, the Church began the practice of selling indulgences. Indulgences were basically documents issued by the Church entitling their owners to various spiritual blessings. This was a controversial practice and was particularly upsetting to a young monk named Martin Luther.

Science and the Church in the Middle Ages

Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation , which was a European anti-Catholic movement, in when he nailed a list of 95 complaints against Catholicism to the door of church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther intended to reform the Church, but his act of defiance, sparked a religious revolution leading to a new Christian sect: The Protestant Reformation turned out to be more than just a religious or anti-Catholic revolution; in time, it developed into a full-fledged intellectual, social, and political revolution that helped bring about the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Era.

Monasticism thrived in the early Middle Ages, and emphasized a denial of worldly pleasure and a commitment to devoting one's life to studying Scripture. It aimed to capture the Middle East from Muslim control. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study. Login here for access. Did you know… We have over college courses that prepare you to earn credit by exam that is accepted by over 1, colleges and universities. You can test out of the first two years of college and save thousands off your degree.

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Want to watch this again later? In this lesson we will learn about the history of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. We will highlight key developments and themes related to the Church during this time, and analyze their impact. The Church in the Middle Ages If you drive through just about any American city or town, you're likely to pass by a number of different types of churches.

A History of the Church in the Middle Ages

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