My enrollment as a religious studies major in college, and the Church history courses I took subsequently, dealt a serious blow to this assumption. As it turns out, I found a good deal of authentic, Bible-believing, Jesus-centered, morally pure Christianity in the 1,400 years between the apostles and Martin Luther. I devoured the books I was given: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa, St. Benedict’s Rule, the lives of St. Francis, the Imitation of Christ, St. Bernard’s commentaries, and all the rest. When I converted to Catholicism two years later, it wasn’t so much that I renounced the religion in which I had been raised. Rather, I had found it all over again, but in a purer, richer, and more abundant form than I had ever known existed.
Even up to the dawn of the Reformation itself, medieval Christians had shown an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible that would have put my Sunday School teachers to shame. Their writings evidenced a heartfelt, personal love for Jesus and His cross that made my own faith seem tepid in comparison; thousands of them had devoted their lives, and even given them up in martyrdom, to plant the seeds of the Gospel throughout the world. These were the values that my parents and pastors had taught me to love and cherish: How could I resist?
Even more, as my academic studies advanced, I found that many of my personal efforts at theological reflection had been spent, as it were, reinventing the wheel. After countless hours spent trying to produce (very bad) arguments for God’s existence for my atheist friends, I discovered the brilliant ones written by Aquinas and Anselm. After spending as many hours puzzling out the meaning of obscure passages of Scripture, I picked up the commentaries of Augustine and Origen and the difficulties vanished. My reaction was very nearly one of betrayal. All these years, this vast storehouse of Christian wisdom had been right under my nose, and no one had told me about it?
My historical assumptions had been all wrong. In every generation—including the Middle Ages—faithful Christians had passed on the torch of the Christian faith, keeping the flame alive even in the most difficult moments. The Reformation had not rediscovered an authentic Christianity long since vanished from the earth: that authentic Christianity had been there all along. Now, I have no misty-eyed nostalgia for the medieval Church, which was just as sin-infected and scandal-ridden as the Church in our own day. Nor do I have any personal disdain for the Protestant Reformers, who in many ways were doing their best to address the legitimate problems of medieval Christianity, even if (in my own view) their radical solutions ended up ripping out the very foundations of the medieval Church they were trying to reform.
So why is it worth giving medieval Christianity a second look? The momentous events of the early modern era—the Reformation, the Renaissance, the discoveries of the New World, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution—so completely reworked Western civilization as to remove almost every vestige of medieval Christianity. And the gifts of the modern age are innumerable: technological innovation, economic prosperity, widespread literacy, and a thousand other undeniably beneficial developments.
Yet underneath this new superstructure, modern civilization has always been fueled by an unstated set of humane moral values such as a belief in human dignity and a broad sense of what counted as good and bad human conduct; a general (if vague) recognition of a divine Creator and a respect for the integrity of His creation; a deeply felt desire for justice and fair play; and the need to make personal sacrifices for the common good.
These values, however, were not modern inventions. They were not invented by the Protestants or the Enlightenment philosophers. Inasmuch as they are part of the Gospel message itself, they were the legacy of medieval Christianity, carefully and heroically preserved and transmitted to the modern world by medieval Christians, often at great cost.
Yet many observers have noted that these very beliefs and values, in the last half century or so, seem to be drying up, and the social and institutional structures of medieval Christendom which once sustained them no longer exist, or at least no longer have the cultural influence they once had.
Medieval Christendom can’t be rebuilt, and probably shouldn’t be even if it could. But the timeless values and beliefs that lay at the heart of medieval Christianity must be rediscovered, sustained, and preserved, if modern society itself is to be preserved.
Introduction
What Are the Middle Ages?
The term Middle Ages, or its adjectival form medieval, refers to a chronological period covering roughly a thousand years, from AD 500 to AD 1500. The beginning of the period is marked by the end of the Late Antique World in Western Europe, and in particular by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century under the weight of barbarian invasions. Its end is marked by the rise of Modernity, and in particular by the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the discovery of the New World.
These demarcations should make clear that the term Middle Ages exclusively describes Western Europe, as these events had little direct effect upon Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, or other regions of the world.
A book about the Middle Ages is thus necessarily a book about Western Europe, although this book will attempt to incorporate some figures from outside this region—Greek Byzantium, for example—mainly for the purposes of comparison. Most historians tend to subdivide the medieval period into the Early Middle Ages (sixth through tenth centuries), the High Middle Ages (eleventh through thirteenth), and the Late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth) in order to draw attention to the full flowering of economic, political, and literary culture that occurred in the middle period.
The term Dark Ages is often erroneously used to describe the Middle Ages as a whole, whereas if the term should be used at all (which is doubtful), it should be used only for the earlier period.
Three dominant tasks occupied medieval Christians during this thousand-year period: the rebuilding of civilization, the missionary work of the Church, and the pursuit of the glory of God. Some background regarding those tasks will help us better appreciate the dynamic Christians discussed in this book.
The Rebuilding of Civilization
Whatever its defects, the civilization of Late Antiquity, as found in the fourth-century Roman Empire, boasted a set of cultural achievements which were the envy of the world. The Greek culture upon which Rome was built supplied a foundation of literary and philosophical wisdom: the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, the poetry of Homer, the science of Galen and Ptolemy, the mathematics of Euclid and Pythagoras, and a fine-tuned liberal-arts curriculum designed to transmit this wisdom to future generations. The Romans themselves had added a superstructure of legal precision, military skill, and political apparatus that allowed the Caesars to place the whole Mediterranean world under their sway.
All of this, however, was gone by the end of the fifth century. What used to be called the barbarian invasions, but which are now more kindly referred to as the Germanic immigration movements, strained the Roman infrastructure beyond what it could handle. The city of Rome itself was sacked by Goths in AD 410. The empire lingered on, with diminishing borders, until the last emperor was deposed in 476. What was once the empire, at least in the West (in the East, the empire survived in Greek Byzantium), was replaced by a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms that knew nothing of Greek or Roman culture.
With no one to maintain it, the intellectual and civic infrastructure of Western Europe rapidly collapsed—schools, libraries, hospitals, roads, bridges, garrisons, urban centers, and everything that depended on them.
One of the central tasks of the Early Middle Ages was to rebuild this structure. Governments had to be erected, law codes written, borders defended, fields cleared, trade routes reestablished, cities rebuilt, schools and hospitals founded, libraries stocked—in short, civilization had to be established from the ground up. While the Dark Ages has become the stuff of jokes for its low level of culture, it was in fact a miracle that culture survived at all.