How Shall We Then Live 2, “The Middle Ages”

The Fall of Rome and the Rise of the Middle Ages

Because of the internal degeneration of the entire Roman system, the empire fell. There followed a time of political, social, and intellectual turmoil, and then a gradual cultural awakening, the Middle Ages.

While there was a decline in learning in the West, old manuscripts of the Greek and Latin classics, as well as the Bible, were kept, copied, and recopied. However, the original pristine Christianity of the New Testament gradually became distorted.

The first century church, of course, was a very simple church. They met in homes, and usually not in large numbers. They met together in these small groups. It centered around the singing of psalms and hymns.

It centered around the breaking of bread, the communion. The first century church centered around, most of all, the preaching of the Bible as the absolute, infallible word of God. If you read the book of Acts, for example, you find a tremendous emphasis on content.

It wasn't religious, as 20th century man thinks are religious, of something just what I would call in the area of non-reason. It really was down into the area of content. It had to do with Christ rose from the dead in space and time.

It had to do with the fact that the Old Testament was the word of God. What these people really believed was in the truth of this, not the religiousness of it, and not even basically the religious experience of it, but the truth of it.

Look at these Christian catacomb paintings done prior to the Middle Ages. Even if simply portrayed, these are real people living in a real world. This vitality and livingness can be paralleled with the living Christianity of the early church.

From Early Christian Simplicity to Medieval Symbolism

But gradually, there was a change from the early Christianity. There was also a change in art. These are no longer real people, but symbols. There was a contrast to the early Christian art. By the 6th century, the last vestiges of modern realism were abandoned, says Michael Goe, in the origins of Christian art.

There is beauty here, and these artists worked with devotion, looking for more spiritual values. But in doing so, their art changed. This came to its climax in the 9th to the 11th centuries. I would like to go back for a few moments to the early days of the Middle Ages.

The early Christian church had turned away from the old Roman music because of its associations with the Roman social practices and the pagan religious rites. There were strong human elements in some of the music of the early church.

We can think, for example, of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the 4th century, who wrote hymns and taught his people to sing them. This was an innovation in his day. Later, under Pope Gregory, there was a change to what we today call the Gregorian chant.

Impersonal, mystical, and otherworldly. In the earliest days, Christians had struggled with a response to Christ's prayer. That they be in the world, but not of it. This challenged the Christian's attitude to material possessions and style of living.

In the early church, believers were noted for their open-handed generosity. Their enemies omitted it. But in the Middle Ages, the pendulum swung back and forth between utter disregard of the command to live modestly, caring for the poor, and the early monastic ideal to have no money at all.

The papal court was properly rebuked for its material lust. John of Salisbury told the Pope to his face, the people thought that,.

The Roman church, which is the mother of all churches, behaves more like a stepmother than a mother. The scribes and Pharisees sit there, placing on men's shoulders burdens too heavy to be borne. They load themselves with fine clothes and their tables with precious plates.

A poor man can seldom gain admittance.

In the midst of all this, Francis of Assisi, recognizing the corrupting effects of money, forbade his followers to receive money at all. Side by side, there were the luxury and the practical materialism of the papal court, and the monastic orders, which gradually became centers of overwhelming wealth.

The church and medieval society making attempts to curb the economic excesses of society, first trying to prohibit and then later limiting the interest rates on loans. Then, with the support of the secular rulers, attempting to enforce just prices.

Medieval economic teaching exalted the virtue of honest work, well executed. And when old age or infirmity made it impossible for the people of the Middle Ages to work, the church often provided them with hospitals and other charitable institutions.

This hospital was open here in Siena in the Middle Ages, much as it is today. And while the modern patients in the 20th century may be glad for the modern medical advances, at the same time, they may admire the superior artistic taste of the old Sienese interior decorators.

Christendom, Good Government, and Charlemagne

On another level, the challenge to be in the world, but not of it, could raise the issue of God's law as against the law of the state. The early church had no problem in the confusion between church and state, because until the time of Constantine, the state was definitely built upon a non-Christian base.

But in the Middle Ages, the problem was much more complicated. You see, Europe was considered as Christ's kingdom, Christendom. Only the baptized person was really a full member of the European society.

Thus, it could be said that it was as though the state itself was baptized or consecrated. Individually, this meant an even more complex problem in regard to the state. This is Lorenzetti's allegory of good and bad government.

It is in the council chamber of the town hall of Siena. It is from the 14th century. Bad government over here, with the devil presiding over all those vices which destroy community. And here, good government and the Christian virtues, from which flow all those activities among men, which manifest man's oneness under God.

The confusion in human government certainly existed in the Middle Ages, when the state and church became intertwined. This is the idea of life under good government, going on uninterrupted. Look at these ordinary people portrayed in this marvelous fresco, able to pursue their everyday lives protected by good government from chaos and violence.

However, as the artist himself knew from the turbulent political history of Siena itself, if the sources of good and evil were distinct, the effects were a jumbled mixture, humanly, of good and bad intentions.

Remembering that the church was everywhere in Europe, it was not surprising that the church worked along with society as a whole, and especially through society's leaders. A prime example is Charlemagne, son of Pippin.

He became king of the Franks in 771 A .D., and gained control over much of the territory of the former Roman Empire. His coronation by the Pope as a Roman-style emperor followed easily. In return, he supplied a strong land base for the Pope in Italy, and he supported missionary activities in the areas which he conquered, for example, among the Germanic tribes.

He also made tithing compulsory, and this supplied funds for church administration. Charlemagne built impressive churches. This one is the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, the city where Charlemagne had his home in his old age.

Thus, church and state power coexisted, as well as feeding each other culturally. The time of Charlemagne was a step forward culturally. The art objects were not large, but they were exquisite. To call the period that produced them the Dark Ages, as the humanists of the Renaissance later did, would be totally incorrect.

Charlemagne encouraged scholars. Learning experienced a restoring through sheer industry, enthusiasm, and systematic propagation. The scholar Alcuin, 50 years old at the time, came all the way from York in northern England to become Charlemagne's advisor and head of his palace school.

Charlemagne and his scholar courtiers laid a base for unified ideas throughout Western Europe, aided by the beautiful Carolinian minuscule script, which was widely copied. All of Charlemagne's scholars were the clergy.

Learning was not general. It seems that though Charlemagne could read, he could not write. Then gradually came a period of further awakening of cultural thought and an awakened piety, and a slow moving forward to the two great contrasting movements, which so mark history right up to our own day.

Romanesque and Gothic Architecture

First, the humanistic elements of the Renaissance, and secondly, the Reformation. It would be impossible to discuss the growing culture in the Middle Ages without looking carefully at the architecture of the time.

This is the White Tower of the Tower of London, in which is the Chapel of St. John. At this time, Romanesque architecture was being born. A leap forward in cultural awakening. Romanesque owes much to the Roman form, but added its own flavor as well.

The rounded arch, thick walls, the dim interiors.

This magnificent rib vault ceiling, located at Durham Cathedral, prepared the ground in a very real way for Gothic architecture. The Abbey of Saint-Denis, just outside of Paris, was built by Abbot Suger in 1140.

Another leap forward in the awakened culture of the Middle Ages. This is indeed the birthplace of the Gothic. Notice the pointed arches at the Cathedral of Chartres. Notre Dame gives us an example of the Gothic flying buttresses.

Saint-Chapelle in Paris shows the Gothic high windows. Large windows. Many windows. And the wonder of the rose window. The Church was moving increasingly away from the teaching of early Christianity.

Authority, Thomas Aquinas, and the Rise of Humanism

In the early Church, the authority rested on the Bible alone. But in the Middle Ages, there gradually had come a change, with the authority divided between the Bible and the Church. Then came Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican monk.

He was the outstanding theologian of that period, and his thinking still has much influence. He had an incomplete view of the fall of man, as man had revolted against God. In his view, the human will was fallen or corrupted, but the intellect was not.

As a result of this emphasis, gradually philosophy began to act in an increasingly independent, autonomous manner. More and more, the teachings of the Bible and those of the classical non-Christian philosophers were freely mixed.

He reintroduced the teaching of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, although Pope Urban IV had previously forbidden it. Because Aquinas emphasized Aristotle, a problem was raised which later became crucial in the humanistic elements of the Renaissance.

Aristotle emphasized the individual things around us, the particulars. This cot is a particular. The molecules which make up this cot are particulars, and you and I are particulars. Beginning from man alone, and from the individual things in the world, that is the particulars, the problem then is how to find an ultimate and adequate meaning for the individual things, and most important, how to find a meaning for man and for life, and what will be man's basis for morals, value, and law.

Later, the mixture of biblical teaching and non-Christian philosophy led to the question, Is the Bible really necessary, since truth could seemingly be reached without it? What has happened, of course, is that Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages has opened the floodgates in his emphasis on Aristotle and on the particulars.

And as this is done, philosophy is increasingly made free from anything that God has said. And as such, we find that man begins to take over and place himself at the center. Increasingly, the authority of the Church took precedence over the teaching of the Bible, and it was emphasized more and more that salvation rests on people meriting the merit of Christ instead of on Christ's work alone.

Gradually there grew up a humanistic element, and that is, what the Church decided was made equal with what the Bible decided. And this just changed everything, because then everything could be brought in, and anything could be brought in.

For example, it immediately led to a different emphasis on how to approach God through man's added works to the merit of Christ, as well as the merit of Christ itself. And all kinds of things changed.

But at the same time, there began to develop a reaction against these distortions of the original Christianity. John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor of the 14th century, raised his voice.

He said,.

The Bible is the supreme authority.

His translation of the Bible into English had an important influence throughout Europe. John Hus of Czechoslovakia said,.

The Bible is the only final authority. Man must return to God through the work of Christ only.

And Wycliffe, when he came forward, and Hus really understood that the deviation had come at a central point, and that central point was the lack of having the Bible as the only authority. One must say about Christianity two things.

The heart of the Christian message is that through the substitutionary death of Christ, we can return to God, and our true moral guilt is removed on the basis of Christ's work.

But on the other hand,.

As far as facing humanism is concerned, the central thing is not the acceptance of Christ as Savior, but the fact that we have absolute truth in contrast to relative truth. And this is the real tension.

Are we merely beginning with man as autonomous, or is the truth from a personal God that gives us real absolutes, and therefore we're not only dealing with statistical averages? Now this has a tremendous impact in the area of morals, in the impact of law and political life, as well as religious life.

It's not minimizing at all the acceptance of Christ as Savior. It's quite contrary. There is no other way to come to God except on the basis of His finished work. But unless this is framed in the concept that we're talking about truth and not just an endless series of relativistic things, merely talking about accepting Christ as Savior will never meet the humanist dilemma.

There is only one real solution, and that's right back where the early church was. The early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed, and it gave them their whole strength, was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute, infallible Word of God.