Late Middle Ages

lecture 24 the late middle ages the third 500 years you might think that the second 500 years went by real fast and that is true second 500 years is a relatively undistinguished period that's not to say it's not important but compared to the first 500 years and the third 500 years and the fourth 500 years it probably has less interest to us but some very important events took place in that second 500 years that we looked at the spread of the gospel in Asia and Africa and in Europe we took a closer look at the Christianization of Great Britain and how from Britain then missionaries went from Ireland to Scotland to England and back to the continent and that we also looked at the preservation of learning and theology that took place in the monasteries and it important centers of education such as the court of Charlemagne and then we had a look at the history of the church in the east leading up to the sism of 1054 the last of that second 500 year period could really be viewed as the true dark ages so we come into the end of that period about the year 900 and through the 10th century what is often referred to as the dark ages to cover a larger period of time could perhaps be more accurately used for that shorter period of time with the near approach of the year 1000 people began to get a bit nervous and wondered what would happen as that fateful year came the eyes of pricidum Charles Williams wrote in his book The Descent of the Dove the eyes of pricidum everywhere expected the end people thought that perhaps now this was the end of everything as the year 1000 approached Williams wrote the end did not come the first millennium of Christianity closed and the second open with no greater terrors than ordinary robberies murders rapes burnings wars massacres and plagues so people saw a sigh of relief and life went on as usual but we need to come now to an overview of the third 500 years and we're going to be studying this period in more detail for the rest of this course but in this lecture I would like for us to take a kind of bird's eye view of the entire period and see some of the important things that we're going to be looking at in more detail before we do so let's look to the Lord in prayer using a prayer from the saram plain song the liturgy of the church of Salisbury in England as pray creator of the stars of night thy people's everlasting light oh Christ thou saviour of us all we pray thee hear us when we call come in thy holy might we pray redeem us for eternal day from every power of darkness when thou judge us all the sons of men amen in this survey we're going to look first at Christianity in Africa in Asia brief glimpse at eastern orthodoxy and then Roman Catholicism in the west you will want to expand the outline some especially under the first two points there Christianity in Africa from the year 1000 to the year 1500 I think if I would choose one word to summarize Christianity in Africa during this time it would be the word survival survival the Christian church in Egypt the Coptic church survived despite great disadvantages under Muslim rule that has been the fate of that church in Egypt that ancient Egyptian church ever since the Muslim conquest but the church was not obliterated as it was in other parts of North Africa but continued to live on sometimes in bigger sometimes in decline but nonetheless it survived as it has done right down to the present day we've been talking about newbian Christianity as well that is Christianity south of Egypt in present day Sudan that early African church reached its peak of greatness during this time the greatest expression of newbian Christianity came during the third 500 years although as Mark Shaw in his book the kingdom of God in Africa puts it the moment of greatness was like the flash of a comet across the night sky because newbian Christianity will not only reach its moment of greatness during this time but will also face its decline and collapse after about 1500 we don't hear anymore of newbian Christianity there's not a church in that area of Africa until the modern missionary movement why was it that newbian Christianity which was so strong for so many years why did it suddenly collapse well it's part of the old story that we've seen elsewhere newbian Christianity was very defended upon a favorable government and as long as that government was in power the church in newvia enjoyed prosperity but when that government collapsed the church did as well I think there's another reason why newbian Christianity failed to live on and that is the Christians in this area were not really able very effectively to reach out in evangelism to their neighbors for one thing the newbians had made themselves very unpopular with their neighbors because the newbians were engaged in a slave trade taking Africans from other countries and selling them as slaves to each up in order to pay for various treaty obligations that the newbians had with the Egyptians so you can see it would be very hard for the newbian church to be aggressively evangelistic and at the same time rating their neighbors in the interest of the slave trade for at least these two reasons and perhaps others newbian Christianity disappears reaches a high point during the 13th century and then a couple of hundred years later has gone completely from the face of the earth the third center of African Christianity was Ethiopia and Ethiopian Christianity survived not only survived but became almost a legend that would inspire many African religions and cultural and political movements in the 20th century Ethiopia in the Middle Ages bears eloquent testimony to the fact that Christianity is deeply rooted in African history and culture there are some ups and downs on all of this history in Africa but the situation in Ethiopia remains the primary illustration of the success of the gospel in Africa by the time we come to the 15th century under King Zara Yacob the Ethiopian church reads the pinnacle of its cultural literary and spiritual attainments so that's a brief overview of Christianity in Africa let's look now at Christianity in Asia and this will have to be very brief too but to get some understanding of the history of the church in Asia we will look for a moment at the third 500 year period in Asian Christianity the word that we used for Christianity in Africa during this time was survival and I think the word that are the several words that we would use for Christianity in Asia could be something like this growth and then decline and almost eclipse this is not going to be a great period of Christianity in Asia we saw at the end of last time our last survey of the 500 year periods in this history second 500 year period that Christianity expanded greatly in the area of China during the time of the Nestorian missions in Tang China but by the 10th century Christianity had all but disappeared during the century as the Tang Dynasty fell Christianity fell with it but that was not the end of Christianity in China Christianity returned in Mongol China we have the period of the Fable Kubla Khan in the 13th century the greatest of the Mongol rulers of China and undoubtedly the most powerful man in the world of his time his empire stretch from Korea all the way down to Burma and all the way over to the Euphrates so you can see something of the extent of this great empire and Kubla Khan who was not a Christian was nonetheless a friend of Christian so during the reign of this Mongol ruler in China and elsewhere through his vast control of so many areas of the Orient Christianity faced an opportunity that it tried to move into there was a fairly wide spread Christian presence at the Mongol court we know that from the visit of Marco Polo who went from the west and discovered Christians in the 13th century in China so we have Christianity prospering during the Tang Dynasty obliterated almost and then recovers returns in China during the time of Kubla Khan in the 13th century but again the same old story with the death of this friend of Christians in 1294 Christianity Christianity radically declined as Kubla Khan the protector of the church in China died and soon we have the second disappearance of the church in China when John of Monte Corvino Italian missionary in the greatest of the Roman Catholic missionaries of this period reached China just shortly after the death of Kubla Khan he was still able to receive a warm welcome and he became the first Catholic archbishop in China in the last until the modern period so the Mongol dynasty with the fall of the Mongol dynasty the Chinese Christian churches disappeared for the second time and for the next 300 years the new China was to be isolationist and nationalist and orthodox confusion ruled by a completely China centered dynasty called the Ming dynasty which means that very few Christians left in China by the year 1500 so some great things took place in China and there were two strong movements one during this 500 year period in China but at the end of the period almost nothing left we might wonder what was happening to the ancient church in Persia that church may have reached its prime in the 13th century but then very much like the church in Newvia its prime was followed by quick decline in collapse by the end of the 14th century Persian Christianity was clearly in decline why was that? It was not really that it became synchretistic Christians in Persia sharply distinguished themselves from Muslims and it was certainly not foreign it was a very ancient Christian culture the Persian culture that expressed itself in Christian faith in Persia but there was a failure I think of intellect a failure of doctrine a failure of study and again the same old story too much defendants on the government Christians had to learn not to put their trust in princess and they had to learn it over and over again when the Mongol ruler of Persia converted to Islam in 1295 the year after the death of Kubla Khan Marked the final blow to the church in Persia that church would survive but only in small numbers under very difficult circumstances Central Asia the victories of the religiously tolerant gingers Khan in the 13th century open opportunity for the spread of the gospel the empire of gingers Khan extended from the yellow sea to the black sea and Christian missionaries began to move into those areas but a second wave of Mongol conquest in the 14th century came from the fiercely Muslim ruler Tamberlain it's often called the scourge of God in the terror of the world and he certainly had no love for Christians so the opportunity the momentary opportunity in central Asia soon disappeared with unparalleled destruction of churches central Asia by now was turning Muslim so by the time we come to the end of the third 500 year period Christianity has received some major setbacks in Asia there were still Christian churches and communities of Christians in western Asia what we would call the Middle East Byzantine Orthodox Christians Syrian Jacobites historians and others but all under Muslim rule and there were those ancient Thomas Christians way over in India still surviving and thriving in some ways but very limited in numbers and very isolated from the rest of the Christian world well it's a very quick overview of 500 years of Christianity in Asia you can read much more about this in Samoffice history of Christianity in Asia let's move now to Eastern Orthodoxy we already had a lecture on how the Eastern Orthodox Church developed as a separate church and that division took place from the west in the year 1054 so just at the beginning of the third 500 year period we can use two dates for Eastern Orthodoxy as we think about the third 500 year period and perhaps summarize the whole period by using the words gain and loss there were some gains and there were some losses for Eastern Orthodoxy during this time the greatest gain major event in the history of Eastern Orthodoxy was the conversion of Russia the traditional date is 988 but about the year 1000 Russia became Christian and Christian in the Eastern Orthodox form of Christianity that greatly expanded Orthodoxy which could not move to the west because of Roman Catholicism and could not move to the south because of Islam or to the east because of Islam but it could move to the north and it did mainly through the conversion of Russia in 988 that was the high point at the beginning of the third 500 year period the low point in the history of Orthodoxy during this 500 year period was the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks at the end of the period in the year 1453 the great capital of the Roman Empire after Rome which had flourished for a thousand years fell to the onslaught of the Muslims in 1453 now let's move further west and talk about history of the church in the west, Roman Catholic history as we could call it by this time and I think the way to summarize this 500 year period is to talk about the consolidation of Christianity in the west we really move into a period in the west that we could characterize by the word chrysidum, the word chrysidum, the kind of union of church in state and culture and we have not only the consolidation of Christianity and culture under the concept of chrysidum but by the end of the period the breakup of all of this because of course we're on the verge of the Protestant Reformation by the time we come to the year 1500 let me just sketch some ideas very quickly and some of these things we'll look at in more detail later let's kind of get a bird's eye view of Europe, Western Europe, Roman Catholic Europe in this 500 year period is what I'd like to do in the next few minutes first of all think of the diversity, sometimes we have an idea that Catholicism was very unified and very monolithic but there were all sorts of people, all sorts of ideas during this period one of the best ways to get an interesting insight into that is to read the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, a selection of that is in the syllabus and you can read about the wife of Bath and the priorys and the parsin and the indulgence seeker and you get different outlooks on the church and the Bible and salvation and truth all within the scope of the Roman Catholic church the next idea that we need to mention next topic during this period is the struggle with Islam that struggle had been going on since the 7th century Islam had moved into Europe and had been defeated at the Battle of Tours but still control Spain and more to the grief of Western Christians still control the Holy Land and so during this 500 year period Christians in the West decide to do something about Islam and what they decide to do is to engage in the Crusades kind of disastrous period for Western Christianity for about a century and a half the churches in Europe were engaged in one crusade after another military ventures into the Middle East or the Near East in order to try to defeat the Muslims militarily and to reconquer Jerusalem and other sites dear to the hearts of Western Christians all that did nothing to strengthen Christianity and did a great deal to heighten the antagonism of Muslims toward the Christian faith as we'll see another struggle that took place during this 500 year period was what is often called the Investiture Controversy and that is really a way to talk about the relation between church and state in Europe during this time you have two interacting authorities one is the church and the other is the state or the various states that made up Western Europe and the question was who had the ultimate authority the Investiture Controversy relates to the problem of who is going to appoint the bishops and the church officials in a country like France or England can the Pope do that or can the King do that? Well the King's claim that they should do that and the Pope's claim that they should do that because each claim authority over the other and we'll study in some detail this struggle within Christdom a struggle since the days of Constantine between church and state, emperor and Pope well there were some great achievements in this period this is a great period for books and theology and for many things that were created and developed and have lived on I did not know until recently that perhaps a golf was invented during this 500 year period when I was down in Alabama I picked up a book one day and began to look at it in the hotel there everybody was going out to play golf I was going to church to preach but I thought I would look a bit in the spirit of things by holding this book about golf and lo and behold I found a bit of church history in there because it showed a picture from a stained glass window in a cathedral in cluster in England from the year 1,350 of a man who had a club that looked very much like a golf club hitting a ball that looked very much like a golf ball so we might say one of the achievements of this third 500 year period was the invention of golf now here's a picture of a medieval pig taking a swing at a golf ball well that may have been no mean achievement but other things were done too during this period it was a great period of theology if the second 500 year period did not produce much in the way of theology of note studies and books the third 500 year period certainly did culminating as we'll see in one of the greatest books of systematic theology ever written the summa of Thomas Aquinas it was also a great period of piety the monastic orders revived and new orders are created and literature of devotion and piety come out of the Benedictines and the sistersions and the Franciscans and the Dominicans and the great medieval orders of this time the popular piety of the people increases but in some unfortunate directions great deal of veneration of saints prayers to the Virgin Mary and piety expressed often in Christ and mechanical ways as we'll see later in general culture it was also a great period it's the time of the rise of the universities by about the 12th century at first schools tended to be operated by the monasteries so education was preserved in the monasteries and the fathers and brothers none of the monasteries taught in the schools from the nasty schools you have the development into cathedral schools the schools in the great towns where there were large cathedrals and out of the cathedrals schools the universities developed so we have universities in Milan and Cologne and Paris and Oxford and other places it's also a period of the building of churches great churches the cathedrals churches such as we have a chartra and throughout Europe the style of church architecture shifted from the heavy dark romanesque to the style we call Gothic with the flying buttresses supporting the weight of the walls and the roofs in order to allow for the first time great areas for windows and stained glass and light and the look of the great churches shifts largely from the older romanesque to the more modern Gothic and it's a wonderful time for literature people are beginning to write not only in theology but in many other areas the divine comedy was written by Dante in the 14th century and at the same time Chaucer was producing his Canterbury tales in England it was during this 500 year period too that many people were aware that all was not right with the Roman Catholic church it's a period of reform and as we go on in the period more and more we see the need for reform some of that reform comes from the papacy itself there is the Gregorian reform name for Pope Gregory VII and Gregory wanted to strengthen and invigorate clean up the church and set it on a better foundation and so the reforms during his reign are notable he tried to do away with some of the financial corruption in the church as well as some of the moral corruption in the church Gregory insisted on clerical celibacy it was the first time that this becomes more of a requirement than a recommendation but due to so much of the corruption that he found in the church Gregory felt that the solution to this would be to insist that every priest be celibate there was also the famous laddering council of 1215 and attempt before the reformation to get the church back on track and this council which made in Rome had some important doctrinal elements one is that the doctrine of transubstantiation was now made official dogma of the Catholic church we saw that earlier there had been a famous debate between Radvertis and Radtrandus over this issue the church had been moving toward transubstantiation for some time as it's official and only view and at the 4th laddering in 1215 that position was taken the 4th laddering also said that every Catholic should go to confession once a year by making annual confession a requirement it probably indicated how lax many people were about the matter of confession this period was also as I've already mentioned a great period for the development of the orders the old orders going back to St. Benedict the Benedictines would experience a number of revivals and renewals most famous of which took place under St. Bernard of Clairville and the sistersions that will study in Bordeaux about in the 13th century two great new orders were established the Dominicans and the Franciscans and we'll look at those two orders in some detail as well but from the standpoint of the official church particularly as we approach at the end of this half millennium this 500 year period it was a time of heresy heresy began to crop up there were the Carthorai or Cathars in southern France which presented a serious challenge to the church in the 12th and 13th centuries this was a real heresy we would say a dualistic gnostic-like mannequin style religious expression that dominated a large part of southern France and Lombardi northern Italy and the church did everything it could to put it down largely through the use of force the word heretic in the 13th century almost always applied to the Cathars but there were some other people who were generally called heretics that we find ourselves very much in line with and we will study these so-called heretics in some detail as we come to the end of this period there was the movement of the Waldensians in Italy a kind of reformation before the reformation in which so much of what was later established by the Protestant reformers was put into practice by these early Italian reformers 500 years before but the Waldensians called the second reformation and then in England Wichlif and his lawlords were preaching grace and translating the Bible and suffering persecution that message spread to Bohemia, to John Hus, preacher in Bethlehem Chapel and Prague Hus finally taken to the Council of Constance where he hoped to not only defend himself but present the true gospel he was not allowed to do that and was put to death burned at the stake in the year 1415 and as the 15th century moved on down in Florence in Italy Girolamo Savonarola was preaching and reforming the church of the city of Florence he died burned at the stake as well in the year 1498 see with the death of Savonarola we have come just about to the end of this third 500-year period and in 1498 Martin Luther is a boy of 15 living up in Germany not yet thinking anything about 95ccs or a Protestant reformation but we are very, very close then to the beginnings of a new period the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever how did the African and Asian historians see the development of the church in Africa and Asia? is it decline and revitalization through a missionary movement from elsewhere? I think they would see it about the same now my major source for my information on all of this is Sam Moffett for Asia but he's a very fair and he's a very Asian-minded historian it's born in Korea, served in China, served in Korea so he feels that he's Asian and Mark Shaw has been a missionary in Nairobi in Africa but he writes very synthetically to African ideas and has read extensively in the African writers so I doubt using those two sources if there would be much difference between presentation of development of Christianity and those two continents okay, anything else? Yes sir, UT? Yes, preaching in the second 500 year period and in the third 500 year period was it by grace or not? well I wish I could say it was the pure gospel of salvation by grace, I'm afraid it wasn't you know, the church had that message lost it largely, at least it went underground and then recovers it in Augustine but then loses it again and we have to come to Lutheran Calvin and the others to find a clear expression of salvation by grace there are those few places along the way, God's Chalk, we've already looked at certainly Wycliffe, Hus, we'll see it again but these people are heretics in the Western church so great amount of the preaching of this period from the standpoint of the reformers would be quite defective I'll talk later about the sacramental system how did a person in the Roman Catholic Church conceive of salvation? how was the person saved and it's certainly not by grace alone during this period I think what I have to say is that even though the messengers often get the message wrong the emphasis in the wrong place they were preaching the Bible they did take the Bible and God has a way of working through very defective means to get his message across and I'd be very unhappy to say nobody was saved for a thousand years I just can't believe that some people will take that very hardline view and say well it was all wrong, it was all Catholic, it was all Orthodox and so everybody's lost but I don't think that was the way it happened yes well that's a very very good comment Keelon is saying there may have been many people who were preaching a much purer gospel than we know about what we know about mainly what theologians produce the patriarchs and the popes and the leaders of the church but much of the message at that time was being spread by common people of course they get all this too comes down to them but could there have been purer sources I think there could have been sometimes the theologians can get it wrong and the people can get it right at least that's a possibility and we would hope that there would have been I guess really what I'm saying there was some other theologians well that's right, not official, not once we know about any other questions right, thank you