PPOG 503
Page 1 of 15
THE CHRISTIAN SYNTHESIS: THE MIDDLE AGES
The proclamation of the Gospel started a revolution that continues to this day. As we know by
faith, it is nothing short of the remaking of the world, which will culminate in the glorious return
of Lord Jesus Christ and the fullness of his kingdom. To understand the beginnings of this
kingdom in history, we need to back up a bit to describe the Jewish addition to political
philosophy that, along with the Greco-Roman theory we have examined, flowered into the
Christian Middle Ages.
Jewish Political Philosophy
The Jews, through Abraham, were drawn from the ancient Eastern civilization that basically
practiced two political forms, tribalism and divine monarchy. In areas where political
aggregation was impossible, such as the nomadic regions of southern Canaan where Abraham
sojourned after his call from God, tribes acted as very large families that were capable of
regulating and sustaining themselves as they came into contact with outsiders; the minor kings
with whom Abraham made treaties are good examples. Egypt and Babylon, in Abraham's day,
and the Kingdoms of David and Solomon were the two major examples of the other type, divine
monarchy. In the pagan form of divine monarchy, the kings themselves were deified and
exercised plenary power over their large holdings with custom, tradition, and logistical
considerations moderating their practical exercise of power; King Ahasuerus in the Book of
Esther is fairly typical of this kind of authority. The Hebrew variant saw the kings as closely
associated with divine authority, but worship was reserved to God alone; in fact, Jewish divine
monarchy prefigured the separation of civil and religious authority in Christian civilization. The
divine revelation of the Law to Moses had established a precedent for looking to God as the
Source of sovereignty greater than any earthly king. As Solomon and his descendants deviated
from the divinely ordained model, they first lost the northern tribes of Israel, which eventually
were overrun and assimilated by the Assyrians, and then themselves were carried into exile by
the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. While the Temple, the center of Jewish culture, was
rebuilt under the Persian King Cyrus, never again did Jews reestablish a monarchy under the
heirs of David; they were subjugated or harassed, first by the Persians, then by Alexander's
heirs, and finally by the Romans, who used client rulers like the Herods. The Jews of our Lord's
day were hoping that the long-awaited Messiah would restore the Davidic kingship in its full
glory.
The Beginning of Our Lord's Kingdom
The spread of the Gospel begins with the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. As the Source and
Incarnation of its message, his work represents the start of the revolution that was to become the
greatest in human history. Jesus was an enigma and a scandal to everyone he met; his birth in a
barn and his childhood spent in a quasi-Jewish backwater despised by the religious Jews of Judea
are scandalous to the Jewish understanding of the sublime majesty of Messiah as they expected
him to come in power and glory, scattering the persecutors of the Jews before him. Further,
Jesus’ lack of documented religious education in the rigorous schools of the Jews and his
vocation as a simple carpenter would have seemed unbefitting a rabbi, let alone one who claimed
to be the Son of God. However, probably it was not the messianic claims for Jesus among his
followers that upset the Jewish religious leaders; many had claimed to be the messiah in the
PPOG 503
Page 2 of 15
Second Temple period following the Babylonian Captivity and had come to the unremarkable
end of most rebellious madmen under an authoritarian imperial power. Rather, Jesus’ public life
was notable to the Jewish religious authorities and parties for two contradictory and annoying
reasons: he was a political moderate and religious radical that worked extraordinary signs that
could not be ignored. With his miraculous signs, if Jesus would have declared a revolt and
assumed the mantle of political Messiah, the Jewish religious leaders may have been among the
most zealous proselytes. But he did not; he evaded their political provocations and continued to
confirm his religious and spiritual ministry with signs and words that indicted the religious class
as corrupt and hypocritical. In fact, our Lord’s passion was the result of a political bargain made
by the Jewish religious authorities with Pontius Pilate that disgusted even that hard hearted
Roman realist: “quid est veritas?” Following Pentecost and the proclamation of the Gospel to the
Jews by the Apostles, the Jewish religious authorities persisted in their persecution of the
ministers of Christ’s Gospel until the destruction of the Jewish religious establishment that
occurred following the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in response to the revolt in AD
70.
The Apostles and the Romans
The destruction of the Jewish Temple marks the culmination of a movement of the center of
gravity of Christianity from Judaism to the Greco-Roman world. While the Gospel had attracted
many Jewish converts, gentiles constituted the major influx of new Christians. The apostles Peter
and Paul had been martyred in Rome and most of the other apostles had been martyred
somewhere in the Greek speaking world. The rapid spread of the Gospel is one of the marvels of
human history and deserves some explanation of its mechanics. The apostles came first to the
Jews in Judea and the other areas of significant Jewish population proximate to Jerusalem; but,
additionally, they came to the Jewish synagogues sprinkled throughout the Greco-Roman world.
These synagogues were the product of the successive Jewish diasporas that had occurred
following the establishment and loss of the First Temple. It has been estimated that 1/7 of the
Greco-Roman world was Jewish in the Apostolic Age. These diaspora Jews lived synthetic
identities: they had a Jewish cultural and religious ancestry, but they were immersed in the
broader Greek culture of the Empire with its Roman-protected roads and citizenship rights. They
were Jews that appreciated their heritage but would be very receptive to a variant of their
fathers’ religion that freed them from the Temple sacrifices and obligations of travel that went
with them. These synagogues contained many influential citizens that became effective
emissaries of the Gospel to other Jews and to non-Jews, the “Greeks” of the New Testament.
The synthesis that had produced the Septuagint made the bridge between Jewish religion and
Greek philosophy
much easier than it would have been before the Hellenic Period; “in the fullness of time, God
sent His Son.”
Early Christian Apologetics: Scripture to Jews, Philosophy to Greeks
As the apostles carried the Gospel to the Mediterranean world, their apologetic method followed
a reasonable plan: they explained the Gospel to each group in a way that would be most
meaningful. To the Jews, the apostles reasoned from the holy Hebrew texts: “He (Paul)
vigorously refuted the Jews in public, establishing from the scriptures that the Messiah is Jesus”
(Acts 18:28). To the Greeks, Paul explained that Jesus was the very knowledge that they sought:
“What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).
PPOG 503
Page 3 of 15
While the canon of New Testament scripture was not collated and standardized for several
centuries, the three synoptic Gospels reflect the tailored message necessary in the
contemporaneous culture. The Gospel of Matthew is written for Jews; Jesus is placed in context
for Jews as a descendant of Abraham of the House of David, the royal line in the First Temple.
Luke’s genealogy extends all the way back to Adam as a sign to Greeks that Christ was
revealed for the salvation of all; additionally, Luke’s literary form and clear historic method,
presented in both his synoptic Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, show the beginning of the
spread of the previously Jewish concern into the message and form of Greeks. Luke’s writings
have been compared favorably with the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. Mark’s Gospel
often is represented as a condensed version of the Gospel intended for the practically minded
Romans; they would want to cut to the chase without the religious or philosophical ruminations
of the Jews and Greeks.
The Romans Take Notice
Finally, enough people in the Empire had become Christians that the Roman political authorities
had to take notice. The Christians were a strange case for Rome. The Jews had established
certain legal prerogatives: they were not forced to participate in the civic cults, and they were
allowed to exercise limited corporal punishment for religious offenses. When all Christians
appeared to be members of a Jewish splinter sect, it was easy to fit them inside existing legal
categories. However, when Greeks, who were manifestly not Jewish and did not profess
themselves observant of Mosaic practices, insisted upon abstaining from Roman civil religion,
there was a problem. To understand the scope of the problem and its bitter fruit, it is necessary
to examine the nature of Roman pantheistic religion and its practical civic implications. Like the
Greek pantheistic religion, Roman public religion was based upon a cult of many gods; each had
a purpose as did the pantheon itself. We described the rise of the polis as something unique from
both the tribe and Eastern divine monarchy; the Greeks saw the polis as superior to the tribe
because the polis facilitated the harmonious living of non-blood related persons with a common
identity represented by the polis. Also, they believed that the polis was superior to ancient
Eastern divine monarchy because the individual was possessed with status and dignity lacking
from the despotic regimes of the East in which the ruler serves as the focal point of civic glory
and all inferiors must sacrifice totally so that the ruler can be maximally magnified. Tribal
religion tends to have a small set of gods that are unique to each tribe and usually ancestors are
thought to participate in the life of the tribal gods to some degree; eastern divine monarchy folds
all inferior religious identities into the divinity of the ruler and the people bask in the presence of
his divinity. The rise of the polis required a unique religious arrangement: a synthesis between
the tribal religions that preserved individuality while simultaneously promoting community. The
pantheistic and anthropomorphic religion of the Greeks and Romans does this; tribal gods and
ancestors are the household deities protecting tribal identity while the political deity is the patron
of the city whose public worship builds community.
PPOG 503
Page 4 of 15
Universal Citizenship and Universal Religion
The Pan-Hellenic religious identity in the oral tradition of Homer furnishes proof for our
assertion that a universalistic religious identity was forming along with the political movement
towards a universalistic citizenship that found its realization in the Roman legal panoply. In fact,
the Roman civic religion with its gigantic pantheon and civic worship of the emperor are the
furthest that such a concept could be stretched; and it was stretched to the breaking point and
beyond. Universal mystery religions were pouring forth in the late classical world; Christianity,
once it had escaped identification as a Jewish sect, was thought by the Romans to be just another
apocalyptic, universal mystery religion like Manichaeism and others. While there were myriad
such religions, each taken separately was not a threat to the Roman political identity and the
religious synthesis that supported it. However, Christianity was gaining converts so rapidly that
it could not be treated as a fringe movement for long; many of the early non-Jewish converts
were soldiers! As Machiavelli and others have noticed, becoming a Christian places some extra
considerations on a soldier’s conscience. Additionally, Christians did not behave like the
followers of other religions that the Romans had found expedient to persecute: Christians seemed
to celebrate martyrdom and each martyr became another testament to the power of the Gospel.
The Roman policy towards Christianity appears schizoid: sometimes they tolerated it,
sometimes they persecuted it. Some of this owes to the different temperaments of the various
emperors, but it mostly stems from the enigma that Christianity was to the Roman world. The
next section will examine the fascinating resistance and final embrace of Christianity by the
Roman political establishment. With that establishment of Christianity, we enter the next phase
of Christian Political Thought: Imperial Christianity
Reasons for Gentile Conversion
We have touched on the evangelism of the Greeks in the previous section that discussed the
apologetic methods of the apostles, but it is a remarkable thing that deserves more explanation.
The Jews were convinced by the arguments of the Apostles based upon the proofs offered from
scripture and from the organic tradition that surrounded the scripture and that served as the
basis of the Jewish culture. In this sense, the gospel to the Jews was much less astonishing than
it would be to the Greeks; the Jews were ready for Messiah and they only needed to be
convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed that Messiah. However, counter-intuitively, the
historical record and the tenor of the scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, suggest that the
gospel received a more favorable reception among the Gentiles, or non-Jews, than among those
whom God had set aside for the express purpose of producing his anointed Messiah. While the
Jews were textually ready for Messiah, Jesus proclaimed them unready for the spiritual reality
that he disclosed and represented: “Search the scriptures: for you think in them to have life
everlasting. And the same are they that give testimony to me” (John 5:39). So why then, without
a textual preparation, did the Greek respond with such enthusiasm to the Gospel? The answer
lies in the moral condition of that late classical world: apathy and despair.
PPOG 503
Page 5 of 15
Origins of Late Classical Despair
The human condition is characterized by two contending emotions: hope and despair. We know
that we are the sons of God and that therefore we are gifted with talents great enough to produce
truly significant social and cultural artifacts. All great human civilizations have begun with this
impulse: we are special because we are descended from the gods and we should demonstrate this
holy gift for ourselves and our descendants. Ancient Babylon and Egypt are the oldest
monuments to proud and hopeful creativity that modern archaeology can verify, and the
scripture tells of the magnificence of the society that set about to create a lasting oblation to
themselves at Babel and of the supernatural heroes that walked among men before the flood and
were like true gods themselves: “Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the
sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the
mighty men of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:4). Every such great civilization, before the
advent of the gospel, has reached an apex and driven itself mad. The madness comes when the
achievements have gone as far as they can on the basis of the good in humanity and it is still not
enough; it is not enough for man has an immortal destiny that cannot be approximated by
anything short of the beatific vision of our Lord and Creator. Then, the despair creeps in and
civilizations seek relief from it in depravity; the sons of gods and their kings that formerly were
the god’s representatives name themselves very gods and demand sacrifices. These depraved
civilizations kill the life within them and disappear from the earth. By the grace of the true God,
he has prevented all of humanity from simultaneously committing cultural suicide and there
remains in each age some part of civilized humanity that has not gone insane.
Christian Persecution as Roman Cultural Suicide
The Greco-Roman civilization had come to its apex in the generation before Christ and was
already starting to despair; the Stoic philosophy of ultimately meaningless virtue is an early
warning of the onset of later depravity. Finally, the Romans started to go the debauched way of
all senile societies and the some of the emperors declared themselves the gods and began soaking
themselves in blood; the blood of Christians was the easiest to obtain, since they were loathed by
Jews and pagans alike. Nero (37–68 AD) was the first emperor to persecute Christians and may
have been responsible for the martyrdom of Peter and Paul; but, Nero was not the first Emperor
to make the cause for active divinity and its sacrifices. We have discussed the political religion
of the Greek and Roman cities; we described it as an organic growth of the institutions of tribal
government and religion that made a synthetic constitution possible. The Roman political
religion had continued to synthesize as the Roman political influence extended; the Senate, army,
magistracies, and other political institutions were religious institutions as well. Before Caesar
successfully revolutionized the political institutions, he had served as the Pontifex Maximus, the
head of the state religion, for several years. After Augustus consolidated the late Caesar’s
monarchical political revolution in the office of the Princeps, the cult of the emperors began as a
semi-divine homage due to the focal point of the Roman political institutions. The worship of the
emperor of Princeps probably was benign in the beginning; indeed, since the state offices were
holy, and the Princeps had subsumed many disparate powers into himself, it would have been
strange if he had not deemed a moderate worship of himself appropriate. As in other aspects of
the shift of Rome towards monarchy, this religious facet was useful to the cohesion of the state
under good emperors but was a tool of mischief and exaggeration under bad emperors.
PPOG 503
Page 6 of 15
Good and Bad Emperors
Caesar’s revolution was a success. Rome had suffered several civil wars in the period preceding
the events that resulted in a permanent monarchical principate. As Cicero had properly
diagnosed in his Republic, the Roman oligarchy had become destructive of the public good
through greed and oppression of the plebes. From Aristotle, Cicero knew that constitutions only
last as long as the balance between oligarchy and democracy survives. Cicero wanted a return to
the constitution of the early Roman Republic, thus he was suspicious of his revolutionary
contemporaries: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. However, the material conditions of Rome at
that time meant that a return was not likely or prudent: the optimates would never voluntarily
rescind power and Rome was no longer a small agrarian city but rather the opulent center of a
magnificent empire. If Rome was to survive as a political unit, the only answer was monarchy of
the type started by Caesar and consolidated by Augustus. And survive it did; Caesarian Rome,
begun c. 49 BC, lasted until Constantine removed the capital to Greece in the fourth century AD.
Caesarian Rome flourished under the good emperors and suffered under the bad emperors, and
Rome’s imperial end was accomplished by a string of ineffective emperors that could no longer
combat the tide of cultural decline and outside invasion.
Cycle of Emperors
Augustus Caesar was the first and most successful emperor. He completed the establishment of
the Principate begun by Julius Caesar’s revolution. He succeeded in making the reforms that
staved off the complete dissolution of the Roman state and body politic; he returned a larger
share of the bounty of the state to the plebeian class and alleviated their fears of
disenfranchisement. The old republican institutions were not capable of self-reform and while
they remained, they were tacitly acknowledged to be but the arms of the emperor. The problem
with the Principate, as with all monarchies, is that they owe their health to one man: the
emperor. A virtuous emperor, like Augustus, could make rapid reforms that aided the state; a bad
emperor could undo the good of his virtuous predecessors in short order. The long period of
imperial rule,
c. 50 BC-c. 320/470 AD (I choose to denote both the evacuation of the imperial authority to
Constantinople and the deposition of the last “Roman” Western Emperor.) argues for the success
of the monarchial reform, but the tumults of Rome did not end with the advent of the emperors.
The general pattern of imperial succession was as follows: a strong and virtuous emperor would
establish peace and harmony including a stable succession that lasts for a few decades until a
weak and morally corrupt emperor would ruin public concord and leave a power vacuum that
lasted until another strong and virtuous emperor could emerge from the chaos. The Augustan
Period was consolidated under the good emperors Augustus and Tiberius and weakened and
destroyed by Caligula, Claudius and Nero. Following Nero, a power vacuum remained and
several weak emperors were assassinated until Vespasian (notable with his son Titus for the
destruction of the Temple in the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD) could attain a governable control
of the monarchy for ten years and secure succession for his sons. This cycle of good and bad
emperors continued until the imperial authority was removed to Constantinople (c. 330 AD)
and was completed when the last Roman ruler in the West was deposed by Germanic invaders.
PPOG 503
Page 7 of 15
Persecutions as Scapegoating
Not surprisingly, Nero was the first Roman emperor to persecute the Church. Public unrest
and persecution of the Church went together in this period, and the logic is not hard to grasp:
the public grew unhappy with the emperor and the emperor needed a scapegoat. This
scapegoating was repeated at the local level as well; when local circumstances became
infelicitous, local governors and populations blamed the new Christians that had sprung up
among them. The imperial persecutions followed this pattern and the persecutions became
more widespread and severe as the Church grew in numbers and in its penetration of society.
The last persecution of the Church, under Diocletian (c. 300 AD), was the worst because by
this time Christianity pervaded all elements of Roman society including the military and
political class.
Martyrs: the Glory of the Early Church
One may expect that the expectation of martyrdom would have filled the early Church members
with dread and limited the success of evangelism; the historical record is just the opposite. The
early Church celebrated martyrs; the word itself means those who witness to Christ’s death by
active participation in it. Eusebius (c. 263–339), one of the earliest Church historians, refers to
martyrs as “spiritual athletes” who earnestly desired to participate in the sufferings of Christ. For
example, Origen, one of the important philosophers of early Christianity, was said by Eusebius
actively to seek martyrdom and had to be counseled to restrain this zeal; his wish eventually was
realized c. 254 when he was tortured to death (we will touch on Origen again in the next section
on heresies of the early Church; his philosophizing puts him in the semi-heretical category).
Christians so highly regarded martyrs that they gathered their remains and placed them under the
altars of their early houses of worship. The martyrs, and the attitudes about martyrdom, confused
the Romans: the more martyrs, the more new converts to Christianity. Finally, following this
worst of persecutions, the Church entered a new phase of political experience: dominance.
Explaining the Faith to the Emperors
While martyrdom was embraced by the early Church, it would be wrong to assume that the
Church was purely antagonistic to the civil Roman authority. In fact, many early Christian
writers wrote apologies in defense of Christianity. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others
wrote public treatises addressed to the civil authorities that were meant to persuade them that the
spread of Christianity was not a threat to their authorities but rather a boon. They argued that
Christ and the apostles had preached civil obedience and that Christians were among the most
law abiding of citizens. While these writers maintained that offering sacrifices and oblations to
the Roman gods and authorities as part of the civil religion was prohibited by their religious
beliefs, they assured the rulers that sacrifices of prayer were being offered on behalf of the
emperor and his governors and local officials. These apologies may have been effective as
evangelism to the Roman political class and may have worked to limit some persecution, but
active physical suppression of Christianity was the rule until Constantine sanctioned Christianity
as a legal religious alternative in the Edict of Milan (c. 313). Following this change in imperial
policy, the official persecutions abated and some reparations of Church property was made to
ameliorate the effects of the earlier oppression of Christians.
PPOG 503
Page 8 of 15
Constantine
Constantine (c. 272–337) is the most important political figure in Christianity’s shift from a
persecuted, underground (literally in the catacombs) religion to the dominant religious and
political characteristic of medieval civilization. In fact, the embrace of Christianity as a political
religion marks the end of the classical period; not everyone was happy about this, as we will
discuss when treating on Augustine and his City of God. Constantine was one of the virtuous
emperors, even without any thought given to his promotion of Christianity. He was a good
emperor in the way that we specified in the previous sections: he was able to provide public
peace and harmony through his strong leadership. He ended the chaos that immediately preceded
his rule under the bad emperors that culminated in the persecutions of Christianity under
Diocletian and his weak successors.
While the Roman Empire retained the name of its civic ancestor, the administration of the
empire was increasingly moving out of the city itself. Rome, and the western portion of the
empire generally, was crumbling under a wave of barbarian conquest. The late classical culture
that had flourished under the protection and consolidation of the Romans was easier to protect
and promote in Greece than in Italy. Like all historical changes, Constantine’s move of the
imperial court to Greece, in his founding of Constantinople at the isthmus of Europe and Asia,
was not the work of one day but rather the final action in a general trend. The emperors had
increasingly been of Greek ethnic extraction and had important courts in Greece. Once the court
was moved to Constantinople, the Western portion was administered by imperial legates
sometimes in Rome, sometimes in Milan, and sometimes in Ravenna.
Augustine
Aurelius Augustine (c. 354–430) is the greatest synthesizer of the various strains of philosophy,
culture, and religion in the early Christian period His biography is sufficient to illustrate this
principle, but it is reinforced by his massive literary corpus, of which the City of God is the most
conspicuous. He was born to a pagan father and Christian mother in northern Africa near
Carthage, an important Roman area. He was educated in the classical Roman fashion to the
Ciceronian legal tradition of rhetoric, which was itself a consolidation of the Greco-Roman
philosophic and legal traditions. His distinction as a scholar led him to found schools first at
Carthage, then at Rome, and finally Milan, the administrative capital of Italy at the time; this was
after the imperial authority had moved to Greece. Personally, as can be read in his Confessions,
Augustine was a restless soul; the prayers of his devout mother, Monica, would not leave his soul
any peace until he found it in Jesus Christ. He tried epicurean hedonism, satisfying his earthly
lusts. This gave him no lasting satisfaction so he tried Manichaeism with its utter rejection of the
physical world, again, to no avail. He moved to the Neo-Platonism of Porphyry and Plotinus with
its contemplative asceticism, but he was still unsatisfied. Finally, in complete desperation, he
turned to the Christianity as taught to him by Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, and found answers
to his theological and philosophical questions and an ethic that could be lived in peace with his
passions in check. He returned to Africa and was consecrated the Bishop of Hippo four years
later. It was as the Bishop of Hippo that he was to produce the mountain of Christian writing that
continues to provoke Christians today.
PPOG 503
Page 9 of 15
City of God
Augustine’s City of God is the encyclopedia of early Western Christian theology and
philosophy. Its pretext is an attempt to provide an answer to the pagan complaints that the
rejection of the Roman pantheon brought about by Christianity was the cause of the city of
Rome’s imperial decline that culminated in its sack by the Arian Goth Alaric in 410 AD.
Augustine demolishes the logic of the pagan argument by showing that the pagan gods of
antiquity have never been capable of protecting their devoted followers; in proof of this, he
mentions that many of the patron gods of Rome were defeated gods that had been brought back
from nations conquered by Romans themselves. Secondly, he argues that the virtue displayed by
the early Romans had been corrupted by the greed and rapacity of the oligarchic empire builders;
in this line, he echoes the Ciceronian lament in the Republic of the loss of virtue among the
optimates. More importantly for Christian theology and political theory, he proposes that all of
human history can be understood on the basis of two cities: the City of Man and the City of God.
The City of Man is the materially minded city of the greedy and fleshly-minded persons
disobedient to God, their creator; the City of God is the kingdom of the righteous, those who
acknowledge and worship their creator. The cities live side by side in the temporal world but the
earthly city will be destroyed in the final judgment of the world and the City of God will
continue as the home of everlasting blessedness of God and his saints. Augustine argues that the
members of the earthly city have ever corrupted God’s creation and established worship of Satan
and his demons; therefore, it is madness to look to such gods for virtue and protection. Only the
true God, the creator that disclosed of Himself to Jews through Abraham, Moses, and the
prophets and to the entire world through Jesus Christ and His apostles, is worthy of worship and
adoration. Since the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ is universal, those wishing to attain to
the heavenly city must avail themselves of the means of conforming to it: the Church Catholic
(Universal). For Augustine, there were two classes of persons that refused to do this: pagans and
heretics. He had already answered the pagans; next, he addressed himself to heretics.
Augustine and Donatism
There were many heresies in the early church. Before the ascendance of the church to a publicly
recognized and, finally, a protected and enforced religion, the heresies could only be combated
by religious means. Thus, the Gnostics, Montanists, Docetists, Manicheans, and others could be
excommunicated but not coerced. The advent of open councils that enjoyed imperial sanction
made the removal of heresy a political possibility. The first coerced heresy was Donatism; this
sect had arisen in northern Africa in protest over the readmission of lapsed clergy. The Donatists
argued that Christians, especially priests and bishops, that had renounced the faith under the later
Roman persecutions should not be readmitted to communion and that sacraments (baptism,
Eucharist, etc.) administered by unbelieving or lapsed priests and bishops were invalid. The
orthodox decision on this issue, supported by the imperial authority, was that the lapsed clergy
and laity could be readmitted with proper rites of penance. Additionally, Augustine developed
the theological tenet that the sacraments of the Church receive their validity and efficacy from
Christ, not from the individual clergy, and thus a sacrament administered in the name of the
universal church catholic was valid even if given by a secretly unbelieving or formerly lapsed
priest or bishop. The Donatists refused this answer and claimed that they were the church
universal and that the rest of the Christians were heretical.
PPOG 503
Page 10 of 15
While the imperial authority was used to attempt to coerce the return of the Donatists, their
geographic location and numbers made it difficult and they remained a distinct communion until
they were swallowed in the Muslim conquest of northern Africa. It is important for us to note
that this episode owes to the conception of imperial Christianity as administered in the East:
courtly Christianity. The organic Western Christianity that later attained a kind of imperial
hegemony at Rome in the office of the Pope is the product of a subsequent historical process.
Pope
Western Christianity cannot be understood without a very clear study of the office of the pope.
The political theory of Western Christianity came to be known as the Two Swords and, under
this theory, the pope directly holds one of these swords, the spiritual, and has a large advisory
role in the use of the other sword, the civil or physical. The pope is the Bishop of Rome and he
sees Peter as the originator of that episcopal chair, or See. Peter was the prince of the apostles
both in scripture and by acclamation of the universal Mediterranean Church of the Patristic Age;
he had established the Church at Antioch and Ephesus before coming to Rome. He was martyred
there along with the Apostle Paul.
Before the advent of public ecumenical councils of the Church, the influence of all bishops was
less pronounced since much of it had to be done in spite of the sometimes persecuting civil
authority. Once the imperially sanctioned councils started at Nicaea in AD 325, the actions of
the bishops became part of the public record. Even before the councils, the Roman church, under
the direction of its bishop, had provided help and encouragement to the other churches in the
Mediterranean region; the same was true of the other important Apostolic Sees in Antioch,
Corinth, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. However, even during this period the Roman church was
recognized by the others as outstanding in its aid to the universal church. The subsequent history
reinforced this: Jerusalem’s destruction and the consolidation of Christianity among the gentiles
reduced its importance, and Rome was conspicuous in its relative freedom from the heresies that
plagued the other regional churches, especially Antioch and Alexandria: the educational and
vocational homes of the heresiarch Arius, respectively.
After the advent of the public recognition and enforcement of Christian religion, the Roman
bishopric continued to distinguish itself. The popes, especially Leo I, were instrumental in the
consolidation of orthodox Christology that was sealed at the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.
We must note that by this time the imperial control of the Italian peninsula was waning and it
was lost forever in AD 476, as attested by the universal denotation of the end of any resemblance
to the imperial authority in the deposition of the last nominal Western emperor Romulus
Augustus. But for our purposes, the imperial authority had departed with Constantine in 320 AD.
The Italian bishops, with the pope as the most important, had been scrabbling together political
authority as best they could. When the Germanic invaders, who were Arian Christians,
consolidated their kingdoms in Italy, the popes and the Catholic bishops under them were not
possessed of open political authority. It was not until much later that the popes gained a civil
dominion over the territory surrounding Rome; before we treat that period, we need to turn to the
missionary conversion of the Arian Germanic tribes and other fully pagan tribes to western
Catholic Christianity. But before considering that missionary project, we need to consider the
Eastern attitude towards the popes following the removal of the imperial authority to Greece.
PPOG 503
Page 11 of 15
The move of the imperial court to Greece coincided with the embrace of Christian religion; first,
as a officially recognized as a legal religion by the late baptized Constantine and later
consolidated under Theodosius and his descendants into the exclusive public religion of the
Empire. Given the understanding of the classical theory of religion in which the state promotes
the religion as part of consolidating its political authority, one might have expected that the
Bishop of Constantinople would have been raised to the most prominent in the Church; this did
not happen, even though it appears that the imperial court wished that it would have. The
reputation of the popes was much too widely acknowledged by the rest of the universal church
for such a move to be accepted. Indeed, the rest of the bishops were incensed when the imperial
partisans at Constantinople attempted to raise the rank of the bishop there to second behind
Rome. The bishops of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Corinth found that a naked political
usurpation. The partisans of papal authority have liked to represent the Roman pope as the
absolute monarch of the universal church from the very beginning, but history suggests that,
while the other important bishops recognized the pope’s special place, they viewed it as first
among equals. As we will discuss, these two positions continued to diverge until finally the
Eastern and Western Churches broke communion even though they continue to practice
extremely similar liturgies to this day and have much more in common with each other than do
Protestants with either Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox.
Catholic Missions to the Barbarians
The ancient Catholic missionaries were priests and monks. Monasteries had formed very early in
Christianity, especially in Egypt, as distinct communities of men who wanted to devote
themselves to poverty, chastity, and prayer. Additionally, these communities were foremost
among the sources of Christian missions and they developed as outposts among the tribal
communities they were working to evangelize. The monks brought with them the Gospel; but,
they also brought with them the language and legal tradition of the Roman Empire. Over time,
these missionary monks were able to evangelize the tribes and synthesize their traditions with
those of the Church. Additionally, they codified the traditional customs into written codes, of
course, with the rule that they be compatible with the Gospel and the spirit of the Roman legal
tradition. This organic synthesis of the Christian Gospel and Church structures, Greco-Roman
philosophical and legal traditions, and the Germanic tribal custom is the basis of the feudal
system that developed in early Medieval Europe.
Ireland and England, two of the earliest Christianized areas of tribal Western Europe, played an
important role in buoying the efforts and persistence of Western Christianity. While Rome and
the rest of continental Europe were being deluged by wave after wave of disastrous tribal
invasions, famines, and plagues, the two islands, Ireland and England, remained fairly unscathed;
Ireland was especially notable for its zeal for orthodox Catholicism and its support of the papacy.
The British Isles had received Christian missionaries very early in the spread of the Gospel, even
before the imperial authority had departed for Constantinople. The Celtic tribes incorporated
Christianity and the late classical literary tradition that came with it and they remained the
protectors of this tradition while many of the early Christian establishments on the continent
were destroyed by pagan invasions and plagues.
PPOG 503
Page 12 of 15
Christian Tribal Kingship and Feudalism
As the synthetic Latin Christian system developed in Western Europe, certain distinct political
traits became prominent. The tribal and distributed nature of the social units was preserved for
the most part; in fact, we will see shortly that the development of larger sovereignties is the
hallmark of passage from the early to the High Medieval period and society. The tribes,
usually Christianized by the first acceptance of the faith by their kings, would then become
discrete Christian societies associated loosely with other tribes by the organizational authority
of the Church centered at Rome. We must make two important observations here: the Church
though centered at Rome was not nearly as centralized and powerful as it was to become in the
High Medieval period and the fact that all tribes eventually were Christian did not mean that
armed political rivalry stopped. The wars among Christian populations continued, but they
lessened in severity as the Christian ethic of charity increased among these tribes.
As more links grew between Christian communities, the political associations between them
grew more sophisticated. Feudalism basically was a system of treaties among tribal chieftains
that became more elaborate and interconnected as time passed. Before we examine the results of
the growing feudal sophistication for medieval society, we need to look at a few of the
conspicuous examples of early Christian monarchy as it grew in power and influence and,
importantly for our understanding of Christian political thought, rivalry with the papacy.
Clovis and the Merovingians
Clovis (c. 466-511), King of the Franks (in modern Western Germany) is the first Western
European Christian king to rise to the level of notice in this development. He was evangelized
through the influence of his Christian wife, Clotilde; she was Catholic although her family
members, tribal kings in Lombardy, were Germanic Arian Christians. Clovis was successful in
conquering most of Gaul (modern day France) and, towards the end of his life, he called the
First Council of Orleans that was to set the precedent for the Western style of civil and
ecclesiastical cooperation. After his death, his kingdom was divided among his heirs with greater
and lesser successes. Like the case with Roman imperial monarchy, the kingdom flourished
when a strong, virtuous king ruled and suffered under weak kings. The later Merovingian kings
(as Clovis’ heirs were known) became so weak that one of their mayors of the palace (a royal
sub-official), Pepin the Short, was crowned king of the Franks by the Pope in 752 AD. This line
of Western Christian kings, the Carolingians, is the first that the popes declared the Holy Roman
Emperors, making them quite important to our understanding of Western Christian divine
kingship.
PPOG 503
Page 13 of 15
Charles Martel and Tours
The Carolingians were important to Western Christianity even before they ascended to the
throne with the blessing of the pope. Charles Martel, the father of Pepin the Short, had been a
mayor of the palace and duke under the last Merovingian king. Charles, the illegitimate son of
another mayor of the palace, was so successful in the military expeditions of his contemporary
Western Europe that he was the de facto King of the Franks and appointed figureheads from the
Merovingian line as titular kings. His greatest accomplishment was his defeat of the Muslims at
Tours. The Muslims, as we discussed previously, had been fantastically successful in
overrunning the Christian Middle East and northern Africa. In fact, by this time, they controlled
Spain (which they were to keep for 700 years) and were actively campaigning in central France
where the decisive Battle of Tours was fought. Considered by some historians as the most
important battle in the history of Christian Western Europe, the Battle of Tours established
Charles Martel and his progeny as the political masters of the West and Charles’ son, Pepin the
Short, was crowned King of the Franks by the Catholic Archbishop of Mainz, Boniface, and
Patricius Romanum by Pope Stephen II; this is the first recorded event of a papal crowning and
thus deserves some reflection, especially since Pepin’s son Charlemagne was to be crowned
Roman Emperor.
Charlemagne and the Origins of the Holy Roman Empire
As we discussed in the previous sections, the popes and the Catholic bishops of Italy and
Western Europe under him, had to contend with the Arian Germanic kings and princes around
them. Gradually, the various tribal kings converted or were defeated by Catholic princes such as
Clovis. The popes, obviously, much preferred the Catholic kings to the Arians and worked to
support their causes. The popes steadily were growing stronger as the territory spiritually
beholden to Rome became larger and more consolidated. The popes were dismissive of the
Eastern Emperors since they were practically powerless in the West and since the Eastern
imperial court had been a continual hotbed of heresy; the Eastern Emperors had been able to
establish a toehold in Italy from Ravenna to Rome that they denoted as the Exarchate of
Ravenna, but it fell to the Arian Lombards until they were defeated by Pepin. Finally, in Charles
Martel, his son Pepin, and especially in Charlemagne, the popes had found rulers that could
provide unified political protection; and, importantly, one of the concessions that Pepin made to
the popes was a grant of territory in Ravenna that would be ruled by the pope directly for the
first time as a civil ruler as well as the supreme ecclesiastical authority. At the moment that
Pepin accepted the crown under the hands of the pope, and surely after Charlemagne was
crowned Emperor of the Romans, the Western alliance and rivalry of the Catholic Church and
large-scale Western European kings had begun in earnest.
Ottonians and the Investiture Conflict
As was the case with the Roman emperors and the Merovingians, the Carolingian dynasty was
destroyed by corruption and incompetence. Charlemagne’s descendants eventually could no
longer administer the religious, cultural, and political movement that their illustrious ancestor
had begun. The crowning of the Germanic king Otto as Holy Roman Emperor marked a shift
in the administrative power from the western to the eastern Germanic tribes.
PPOG 503
Page 14 of 15
It was here that an important battle within the political administration of Western Christianity
was to be fought. The Investiture Conflict, the inevitable contest between the two heads of
power, ecclesiastical and civil, illustrated the uniqueness of the Western Christian synthesis and
the political and religious tensions that it contained. In this contest between the centers of
religious and political authority, the office of bishop was the prize; bishops, originally purely
ecclesiastical shepherds of geographically associated congregations of Christians, had, in the
frequent absence of coherent civil authority, come to exercise considerable political
administrative duties. Therefore, chief magistrates had a cogent interest in selecting bishops, and
the lack of the logistical means of ecclesiastical centralization meant that the papacy generally
gave tacit consent to the installation of bishops by these magistrates. Since the magistrate
invested the bishops with both the tokens of civil as well as ecclesiastical administration, the
popes began to protest that kings did not possess the spiritual authority to consecrate the spiritual
portion of the office. Naturally, the kings disagreed and these theological, political, and
ecclesiastical disputes came to a head in the personal contest between Pope Gregory VII and the
Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV. Disregarding the fascinating details of the conflict, the
resolution, found at the Concordat of Worms in 1122, was that the king would invest bishops
with the tokens of civil authority and ecclesiastics, with the consent of the pope, would perform
the spiritual consecration of bishops.
Medieval Cultural Character
The ascension of Charlemagne marks the beginning of the political structure of medieval
Europe: the birth of the cultural movement that was to culminate in the High Medieval period
that reached its peak c. 1300 AD. The five hundred year period that began with Charlemagne’s
consolidation of rule and protection for the Catholic Church inaugurated something new in the
world. For the first time, Latin Christianity had a free reign to shape its own culture and the
result was different from anything that preceded it. In fact, I will argue, like Luther and Calvin
did, that the modern period cannot be understood except as a conscious rejection of the culture,
ecclesiology, and politics of the civilization that grew during to maturity during this time. That
culture was the product of the relentless attempt to make every aspect of human life comply with
the Gospel as understood by the Latins; the Greeks never had the chance to do this since their
civilization was the result of a grafting of the Gospel onto an already ancient culture and
political structure that survived the transition from pagan to Christian religion. The Latin
European Christians, while mixing elements of the Greco-Roman civilization with their own,
represent the first attempt in world history to build a civilization completely on the basis of the
Gospel.
Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, the noble born patrician turned mendicant Dominican friar, represents for the
medieval Christian world what Aristotle did for the Greek civilization: its greatest philosophical
synthesizer and cataloger. By Thomas' time, Christian civilization, the Christian design and
control of all the social and political institutions, had been a reality in Western Europe for at
least seven hundred years. Up until his work, most of Christian political philosophy had been an
organic combination of feudal monarchy, Roman legal theory mixed with ecclesiastical custom,
and a decidedly Augustinian theology, which had lots of Platonic philosophical language if not
Platonic conclusions.
PPOG 503
Page 15 of 15
This philosophical consensus was being challenged by the scholarship in Christian universities at
Paris, Cologne, and Bologna on Aristotle's works, which were newly available from contact with
Eastern Christians fleeing the Islamic conquest of large portions of the Byzantine Empire
centered at Constantinople. Some of the more extreme Aristotelian enthusiasts, like Siger of
Brabant, wanted to remove nearly all of the previous understanding of Christian philosophy.
Thomas, by contrast, was the greatest representative of the school that wanted to keep many of
the traditional elements while updating them with the best of the new scholarship.
Political Philosophy in the Summa Theologiae
Aquinas' best known work, his Summa Theologiae, was written as a guide for seminarians to
learn the Catholic faith and its controversies; it started out as his commentary on the Sentences of
Peter Lombard, the previous dominant text for that purpose. As we have been describing, such a
work by necessity would also contain a political theory since the medieval political synthesis
was based on the Christian idea of divinely ordained civil monarchy and papal ecclesiastical
supremacy. However, for the same reason that Augustine does not really specify a best political
constitution, which is the Christian doctrine that man's eternal destiny is blessed unity with God,
Aquinas' political ideas have to be gained in passing from his theological commentaries as they
touch upon political subjects, such as ethics, the purpose of human laws, economics, etc. For
Aquinas, like Aristotle, the best polity is one that makes it easy to be virtuous; but for Aquinas,
this means one in which the Church is allowed to do its work: proclaim the Gospel and
administer the sacraments. Civil monarchs need to do everything in their power to provide for
the material well-being of their subjects so that its religious life can be carried forth with security
from harm and adequate material provisions, both for the Church and citizens. In practice this
meant maintaining military alliances that could protect against barbarian invasion and regulating
the taxes and dues paid by serfs and feudal vassals. As time passed and greater security and
material wealth accrued, this system started to experience its own problems with corruption and
abuse. We will cover these in Module/Week 3: The Christian Synthesis Part 2, The Reformation.
