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The History of Christian Europe

Name: The History of Christian Europe
Author: G. R. Evans

G. R. Evans

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232 pages
English
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eBook - ePub

The History of Christian Europe

G. R. Evans

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How did Christianity come to have such an extraordinary influence upon Europe?

Beginning with the transmission of Jesus - teaching throughout the Roman world, Gillian Evans shows how Christianity transformed not only the thinking but also the structures of society, in a Christendom that was, until relatively modern times, essentially a "European" phenomenon. She traces Christianity's influence across the centuries, from its earliest days, through the East/West schism, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, to its development in the scientific age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its place in the modern world.

The History of Christian Europe will appeal to scholars of religion and history who are seeking a fuller understanding of how Christianity helped shape and define Europe and, consequently, the wider world.

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Informations

Éditeur

Lion Scholar

Année

2018

ISBN

9781912552108

Sujet

Théologie et religion

Sous-sujet

Christianisme

CHAPTER 1

CHRISTIANITY AND EUROPE’S SENSE OF IDENTITY

Although the European Community is still growing, Europe is physically very small in proportion to its historical importance and its influence in the modern world. On the map of the world, as a modern geographer sees it, Europe occupies a tiny corner of the Eurasian land mass, naturally bounded by the sea on every side except to the East, where the boundary with the continent of Asia has been the subject of political and religious dispute. The British Isles are separated by sea from the European mainland by twenty miles or so at the narrowest point. Iceland is often included in Europe, though it is remote from its main territories.

The problem of determining the boundary between Europe and Asia presented itself quite forcefully to early Christians. Orosius (c. AD 385–420) discusses it in his book Against the Pagans. Russia reaches far into Asia, but European Russia begins at the Ural mountains. The border runs south a little uncertainly, down to the Caspian Sea, along the mountains of the Caucasus or perhaps the Kura River, and on to the Black Sea, where it runs though the Dardanelles. Then the sea provides a continuing natural boundary to the Middle East down to the Suez Canal and the beginning of Africa. The exact point where Europe becomes Asia is viewed differently by geographers of different nationalities, the Russian view, for example, tending to put the Caucasus in Asia. The dual-continent aspect of Russia was still a point of interest in the seventeenth century, when ‘Europian Tartars’ are mentioned (1603).

Looked at from outside the ‘world’ of Europe, it is not obvious that Europe is entitled to be considered a continent at all. Sometimes it has been called a peninsula of Eurasia, and some of the migrant Indo-European peoples who moved west into Europe treated it as though that was exactly what it was. There are important – and topical – questions today about the influence Asian civilizations had upon the formation of Europe at this early stage and later; why ‘Europe’ ended geographically where it did; and how far there was an interpenetration of cultures between the civilizations of the East and those of the European West. In other words, what does it mean, culturally and geographically, to talk of ‘East’ and ‘West’? The answers began to change, first with the coming of Christianity and secondly with the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD.

The Idea of Europe

Europe has not always been seen in the way it is on a modern map, as a distinctively shaped tract of territory with the physical and human geography in position. Throughout most of the history of Europe, the exact lie of the land could be mapped only roughly by the standards of modern cartography. More importantly, Europe has been an idea, part of an explanation of the world, and Christian apologists have entered enthusiastically into that process. So before we begin on the story of the way Christianity emerged in Europe and the effect it has had, we need to explore this ancient ‘theory’ of Europe.

The word ‘Europe’ probably derives from the name of Europa. In one of the Greek myths she was a Phoenician princess, carried off by Zeus the king of the Gods, who had turned himself into a bull for the purpose; in the story he took her to Crete, where she bore the child who became its king, Minos. The Greek poet Homer describes her as queen of Crete. By about 500 BC ‘Europe’ was being used by the Greeks to describe first the Greek mainland and then more northerly parts of the modern European land mass.

The Classical Idea of Europe

The ancient convention was to divide the world into Europe, Asia and Africa (sometimes called Libya). The way classical authors write about this is a reminder of the heavy colouration of the politics and social structures which determined the angle from which they looked upon the world, and also the extremely limited geographical knowledge they had beyond the territory occupied by the Romans at the height of their imperial power.

The Greek historian Polybius (born c. 208 BC) pressed for Greek acceptance of Roman supremacy in Greek lands, while hoping the Greeks would quietly preserve as far as possible the autonomy of the city states, for the city state, with its modest size and opportunities for active participation in affairs, was the preferred government arrangement of the ancient Greeks. His descriptions of the lands of Europe is heavily geared to considerations of advantage in military and naval warfare. He notes the location of advantageous promontories from which to see the enemy coming, for example, and good launching points for ships to stop them.

For the duration of Rome as republic and empire, the centre of the world was Rome. The Romans fell into the habit of seeing themselves as looking out from the centre of the world, and that made it easy to leave the remoter fringes of the known world a little vague. Polybius is inclined not to bother in his main account with the lands ‘densely inhabited by barbarous tribes’ such as lie along the Iberian coast of the Atlantic and have only recently come to notice, or the northern parts which are ‘up to now unknown to us, and will remain so unless the curiosity of explorers lead to some discoveries in the future’. To the south, too, beyond what is known of ‘Asia and Africa where they meet in Aethiopia’, ‘no one up to the present has been able to say with certainty whether the southern extension of them is continuous land or is bounded by a sea’.

Strabo, a Greek geographer (64/3 BC–AD 24) who sees himself as a Roman citizen, is also clear that the geography of the world can best be interpreted with reference to the hegemony of Rome. Rome began with only one city. The Romans ‘acquired the whole of Italy through warfare and statesmanlike rulership’, and then, ‘by exercising the same superior qualities, they also acquired the regions round about Italy’.

It is true that the sea bounds modern Europe on most of its sides, but for the Romans the northern extremities lay on the edge of empire, at the great rivers not the ocean. As Strabo describes it, the Rhine and the Danube were natural boundaries for the Romans:

Of the continents, being three in number, they hold almost the whole of Europe, except that part of it which lies outside the [Danube] river and the parts along the ocean which lies between the [Rhine] and the [Don]. Of Libya, the whole of the coast on Our Sea [the Mediterranean] is subject to them; and the rest of the country is uninhabited or else inhabited only in a wretched or nomadic fashion. In like manner, of Asia also, the whole of the coast on Our Sea is subject to them, unless one takes into account the regions of [those] who live a piratical and nomadic life in narrow and sterile districts; and of the interior and the country deep inland, one part is held by the Romans themselves and another by the Parthians and the barbarians beyond them; and on the east and north live Indians and Bactrians and Scythians, and then Arabians and Aethiopians; but some further portion is constantly being taken from these peoples and added to the possessions of the Romans.

Both Alexander the Great’s (356–323 BC) wars with Persia in the fourth century BC and the well-established trading links had long made it apparent that there was business to be done there with advanced and civilized peoples, and peoples who might be ambitious to move into Europe. The term ‘Asia’ seems to have been used first by the Greek historian Herodotus about 440 BC, though he used it primarily for Asia Minor, an area familiar to the Greeks. By the time of Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) writing his Natural History, it was possible to devote several books of the work to a detailed description of the lands of the world, with details of their population and history and a sprinkling of gossip to enliven the texture. These authors were writing in the period when the Roman empire still controlled most of the lands which now form Europe, north Africa and the near part of Asia and was actively engaged in trade with India, thus reaching far into east Asia, and they saw the extent of the world accordingly. Pliny discusses a good deal of Asia, including the ‘Arabs’.

The Roman notion of ‘Africa’ tended to be confined to the strip along the Mediterraean coast and to Egypt and Ethiopia, with vague notions of what might lie beyond. The ancient idea of the three continents being surrounded by an ocean still seemed probable for a long time, as late as Bede (c. AD 672/3–735), for example. This notion discouraged the conception of an Africa stretching unimaginably far south.

Classical authors had an assumption that if a place was uncivilized (by which they really meant not under Roman control) it was not really a ‘place’ at all. It needed to be inhabited in a way which would give it shape and character; to have a particular kind of human geography. The classical world thus fades into a vague blur at the edges, partly because no one who matters is living there.

The Origins of the Bible

The Bible did not arrive ready-made with its content agreed. It was the creation of several centuries of discussion about what should be accepted as constituting God’s Word and in what sense the writings of human authors could be taken to be of ‘divine’ authorship.

It was not until about the fourth century that it was more or less agreed which books should be included in the Bible. Several candidates were eventually excluded. Clement of Alexandria thought the Didache (first to second centuries) was part of Scripture. The Didache gives a picture of the church life of the first Christians, the way they thought baptism should be administered (by total immersion), the way they conducted celebrations of the Eucharist and the way they fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. Another candidate for inclusion was the Teachings of the Apostles, which was probably written in Syria in the early third century. Then there were the Apostolic Canons, which date from about AD 350–380. They list the books of Scripture in the last of the canons, including among them the canons themselves. Scripture was most commonly copied, studied and commented on in the form of separate books.

Jerome, who made the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible, was then still actively discussing which books were part of the Bible and which were not. What is sometimes called the ‘canon’ was probably defined only about AD 382, and there was still room for dispute about the inclusion of the Apocrypha, a cluster of books which the Roman Catholic Church prints in the middle of the Bible and Protestants usually leave out. Exactly which books constitute Scripture was still being disputed in the sixteenth century. The fourth session of the Council of Trent (1546) produced a list of the Apocrypha, which the reformers did not count as Scripture, considering them ‘false’ or ‘spurious’ and not properly part of the Word of God.

The idea that there were certain texts which God had inspired so directly that he dictated the very words into the ears of the human authors who wrote them down is made visible in medieval pictures of the four evangelists busy writing, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove dictating into each one’s ear. Jerome had been conscious of the importance of this idea and was careful to insist that he did not regard his translation as itself inspired. That did not prevent Western scholars of later generations treating it as though it was, analysing every word as closely as if the Holy Spirit had dictated it in Latin.

The natural mode of Bible study in the early church was for the bishop to preach lengthy exegetical sermons, working his way through whole books of the Bible. Such preaching was done from the bishop’s seat in the cathedral and formed part of the liturgy. In the West this happened in Latin, but as this was still the vernacular the congregation would have had no difficulty in understanding what was read to them and what the bishop said about it. In the East, where Greek went on being spoken, the Greek text of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint because it was believed to be the work of a team of seventy, and the Greek text of the New Testament never ceased to be available for direct study, and the Vulgate had no place in the tradition of reading, preaching and exegesis.

The Christian Idea of Europe: Europe as ‘Christendom’

With the coming of Christianity the central vantage point moved for a time from Rome to Jerusalem and the world acquired new dimensions. Augustine’s contemporary Jerome offers a new view of the location of the centre of the world. Referring in his commentary on Ezekiel to the statement that Jerusalem is positioned ‘in the midst of the nations’, he shows how the three continents are deployed around Jerusalem. That is not by any means the same as suggesting that the world began to be run from Jerusalem in a practical or commercial sense. It was all a matter of perception: primitive Christianity was a circle which had Jerusalem at its centre. This was an important shift because Christianity, like Judaism, was by origin an Eastern religion. It began in Asia, in what is now the Middle East. Believers in Jesus Christ were apparently first called ‘Christians’ at Antioch (Acts 11:26).

However, Jerusalem did not remain central for long. The first epistle of Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150–215) to the Corinthians suggests that the Christians in Rome were taking it for granted as early as the end of the first century that Rome should lead the church, pointing to the fact that the Apostles Peter and Paul had been martyred in their city. The great change was the decision to move away from expecting Christians to co...