I have taken great effort to include Doctors of the Church whenever possible, although some have been regrettably omitted. The term Doctor, Latin for “teacher,” is used to recognize those saints who have made particularly important contributions to the Church’s theological tradition: usually they are theologians, though sometimes mystics or pastors have received the honor.
A greater effort has been made to ensure that the book presents a representative sampling of medieval Christianity. Too many treatments of this period resemble a roll call of celibate male clerics. Without casting doubts upon the immense contributions carried out by churchmen during the Middle Ages, it would be a shame to overlook the work done by laity, and by women in particular, in carrying on the faith in this period. For this reason, I have included six women as subjects of this book, and six married persons.
As a professional theologian, I have worked hard to overcome a prejudice for my own discipline, and to fight the tendency to write nothing but biographies of university professors. Instead, to capture the diversity of contributions made by the medieval saints, I have come up with several categories into which to group them. Admittedly, they are somewhat superficial; most of these personalities are so multifaceted that they are hard to pin down!
First are the missionaries, those who devoted their lives to the spread and proclamation of the Gospel.
Next is the group I call the leaders—those who founded institutions, ruled nations, or simply rose to the occasion when intelligent and creative leadership was needed in the Church or society.
Third, we have the martyrs, those who paid the cruel price of fidelity to the Gospel, shedding their blood in the name of Christ.
Fourthly, those I call monastics, who dedicated their lives to the values of poverty, chastity, and obedience to give witness to the kingdom of God.
Next, mystics who excelled at a life of prayer and communicated to others the path to a mature spiritual life.
Sixth, the thinkers, the intellectuals who helped to develop, clarify, and defend the Church’s theological and philosophical traditions.
I have ended the book with a seventh group, Eastern Christians, who carried out some of these same tasks in the regions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Of course, some figures fit in more than one category, and a rather arbitrary judgment call had to be made. For example, Boethius is undeniably a thinker, a martyr, and a leader.
As for the specific writing selections, I have tried—as with the choice of writers—to find a balance between high quality selections and diverse, representative samples. The reader will find theological and philosophical tracts, commentaries, dialogues, homilies, letters, scientific treatises, last wills, judicial transcripts, biographies and autobiographies, prayers, hymns, poetry, legislation, and much more. I have tried to select writings from the saints themselves, but when this was not possible (Elizabeth of Hungary, for example, left no writings) I have opted for the writings of their friends or associates, or at least near contemporaries.
The vast majority of Western medieval writers wrote in Latin, of course; Eastern writers, in Greek. In some cases I have made my own translations; in a few cases permission has been graciously granted to use those of others. In the majority of cases I have simply adapted older, public-domain translations, updating them for readability. Readability has to be balanced against fidelity to the original texts, and I have consistently favored the former without (I hope) doing violence to the latter.
This book is not written with scholars in mind, and those who wish to use these texts for scholarly ends will likely complain of the absence of some elements they have come to expect (reference to critical editions, footnotes with variant translations, and similar material). My aim throughout has been to produce writing samples that are clear, concise, and enjoyable to read, yet which remain substantially true to the original texts. A bibliography at the end of the book indicates which sources I consulted for each chapter.
Mediterranean World, Early Middle Ages, c. AD 500
Medieval Missionaries
No Christian would deny that missionary work is part of the fundamental charter of the Christian Church. The call to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) echoes throughout the centuries as Jesus’ last and greatest charge, and Christians of every generation have responded to it generously. The bold example of the original apostles, especially the globetrotting St. Paul, served to inspire hundreds of missionaries during the patristic period, including great names like St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, and St. Martin of Tours. By the close of the patristic age, churches had been planted from Ethiopia to Ireland, from Spain to India.
Yet the medieval period brought new missionary challenges. The “barbarian” immigrants, mostly of Germanic races, had flooded the European continent from the northeast, carrying with them their devotion to pagan gods and hostility to the Catholic religion of their Roman adversaries. Even as these were receiving the first seeds of the Christian religion, new fiercely pagan immigrants arrived in the form of Vikings and Magyars.
To complicate matters further, the initial missionary successes among the barbarians had been carried out by non-Catholic missionaries, the heretical Arians, who denied the divinity of Christ. Then there was the problem of Islam, which had overcome the Christian communities in Asia and North Africa by the eighth century. As for mainland Europe, while there were certainly still scattered communities of Catholic Christians, the institutional structures of the Church had been shattered by the invasions: many Christians had not seen clergy for decades and thus lapsed easily back into the pagan superstitions of their past.
In short, by the time of the great missionary awakenings of the seventh century, many among the Christian leadership probably saw themselves as starting from scratch, re-evangelizing an utterly de-Christianized continent.
In some ways medieval missionary work looks very different from the way it is typically carried on today. In the Middle Ages there was a shared cultural assumption that the general population would hold the same religion as the ruler, so a common pattern resurfaces where the conversion of a king would result in the mass baptisms of a nation’s entire population.
Another cultural assumption was that a religious figure would legitimize his message by performing miracles, often “outperforming” the representatives of rival religions, as Elijah did on Mount Carmel (see 1 Kgs 18), or Moses before the Pharaoh (Ex 7). Further, because the primary religious alternative to Christianity was paganism, which the New Testament itself describes as demonic in inspiration (1 Cor 10:20), Christian missionaries were often seen as striving against Satanic powers, winning souls from devil-worship. These patterns or themes are, it seems, rarely stressed today.
But in other ways the missionary work of the Middle Ages looks very familiar to us. Then as now, the task of evangelizing was usually combined with the task of civilizing, so that missionaries would spend as much time teaching agricultural methods and basic literacy and providing medical care as they did preaching the Gospel. Also, we see medieval missionaries wrestling with the question of inculturation, or how Christianity would fit into distinctive cultures, balancing a respect for the inherent goodness of every culture with the need to preserve the essential message of the