43 - Holy Roman Empire and Monasteries

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Anyway, I actually happen to remember, shockingly, where we are in the Church History series.

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I say shockingly because last weekend, last Saturday, a week ago

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Saturday, I was in Fort Worth, downtown Fort Worth, and I was lecturing on Reformation issues, and of course

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I was in Washington for October 31st itself. So, when you go running off like that, did you forget?

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We're good. Oh, okay, alright, now he's got me worried. If I start the introduction, will it be lost, or do

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I stretch, you know how they do on radio? Normally you don't have to stretch, you have to compress, but anyway.

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And so I was speaking on Luther and the Reformation stuff, so I was looking at my notes going, oh my goodness, where in the world are we?

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And then I realized, well, we're still a ways back there. We last had been talking about Charlemagne and the

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Carolingian Renaissance, and I think we were talking about, we had just mentioned that when

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Charlemagne died, they kept his body on the throne for 100 years, does that sound familiar to everybody?

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Been that long, some of you are going, I don't know, I don't take notes, I don't care. But I do remember mentioning that, and that Charlemagne, or just simply

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Charles the Great, that's what Charlemagne means, instituted the Carolingian Renaissance, he founded the palace school, headed up by a fellow by the name of Alcuin, you'll see

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Alcuin's name especially like used, I think there's an

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Alcuin used bookseller someplace online or something like that, which makes sense. He was a scholar,

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Alcuin, my wife's not here, but I've been trained well,

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I can just see her disapproving stare from the back even if I don't do it, a scholar from England who died in 804, the palace school was an important link in education, for it maintained some connection with the past and provided the link to the future, so in other words, a lot of people feel that some of the ancient classics, works of literature and things like that, had it not been for the

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Carolingian Renaissance and the palace school, we may have lost some of those works from the past, but there was a brief uptick, shall we say, in interest in those things during this otherwise difficult period.

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Charlemagne had three sons, and this has nothing to do with the children's film

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Brave, yeah my three sons, I hadn't thought about that one, Charlemagne had three sons who squabbled and fought amongst themselves, that's a situation that repeats over and over again in history, a new center arose called the

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Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, and one of the reasons for this is there was a great need for a defensive alliance at this period of time due to the activities of, well it wasn't the

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Green Bay Packers, it was the Vikings, yes, but these were the real

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Vikings who would have been called on penalties for everything they did.

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The Vikings were making invasions into just about the entire northeastern

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European continent at this point in time, and they would follow river routes into the interior.

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They were fierce pagan warriors, and if you've ever heard of the term the blood eagle, this is the time period it came from, they would use the blood eagle as a means of intimidation, so what they would do is they would come into a village and they would challenge the strongest man in the village or the community to battle, and upon defeating him they would cut him up and lay out his body, cut his body up in the shape of an eagle, and leave it staked to the ground as a means of saying to the people, this is your strongest guy, this is what we'll do to all of you if you don't just basically do what we say and roll over.

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And so the Viking invasions, they weren't so much looking for land, it's not like they were trying to establish some huge kingdom, it was plunder, prisoners, booty, get what you could, you know, take it with you.

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And so the Vikings had ruled in Britain for about 200 years,

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William the Conqueror was a Viking, Henry the

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Fowler, Henry the Fowler, now what do you think he did? It's interesting when your entire last name is related to what your hobbies are, but Henry the

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Fowler was Duke of Saxony in 919, the last of the

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Carolingians died in 911, and so Henry the Fowler unified Germany and drove out the invaders in 962, a man by the name of Otto I was crowned as Emperor of the, and you're going to see this a lot,

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I mentioned it before, Holy Roman Empire or HRE, Holy Roman Empire, there has always been,

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I think there still is among some people, a backwards longing look to the great grandeur that was once Rome, and there have been many who have tried to re -establish that kind of awesome power that strode across all of Europe and was so undefeatable and yet fell from within.

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What's interesting is the Holy Roman Empire, in some form or another, now obviously it had many permutations, but you could argue that the

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Holy Roman Empire lasted from 962 until its last vestiges were wiped out by some fellow, oh what was his name again, oh

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Napoleon, yeah, in 1806, so that's a long time, now some would argue that there were periods in there, can you really identify it as that, but you could make the argument that it lasted that long, just not overly consistently during that time period.

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It was basically a loose alliance of dukes or electors who would meet in what were called diets, this is what throws people off about church history, diets has nothing to do with what you eat, this would be the equivalent of our, we don't have an equivalent,

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Senate would be the closest, because they're a little bit more hooty -tooty than the

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House representatives, but when we get to the Reformation, we will hear about Charles V, Emperor of the

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Holy Roman Empire, and Elector Frederick, so we had electors from these various areas that would meet in these diets, and we'll talk about the

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Diet of Worms, and I promise you, I promise you, we will be to that period of church history before 2021, the 500th anniversary of when

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Charles appeared before Charles V at the Diet of Worms, that is the diet that met in the city of Worms in Germany, and before we get to the

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Diet of Spire 1 and 2, Diet of Spire 1 and 2, this is 1526 and 1529, why is that important?

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I just wonder, just for the fun of it, might there be anyone in the room,

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I won't put any pressure on any PhDs, anybody in the room on this particular subject, why the

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Diet of Spire 2 in 1529 is so relevant to us, anybody know?

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No, Wickliffe was dead in 1384, so 1529, he's long been dug up, burned and his ashes scattered in the

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River Swift. Yes, I understand, there's a lot of history, people need to understand that,

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I didn't put any pressure on you, I wasn't trying to anyways, 1529, this is way ahead of our curve here, but just so you know, in 1526 at Spire 1, the

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Lutherans had the majority of electors and so they gave freedom to Reformation to take place in various portions of the

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Holy Roman Empire. In 1529, Charles has reconsolidated his position, the majority of electors are now

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Roman Catholic, so they reaffirm the edict of the

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Diet of Worms condemning Luther and reverse the movements toward peace and freedom that Spire 1 had done.

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So Spire 2 reversed all that, as a result, the minority of electors used a legal process in the

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Holy Roman Empire, where if you formed a minority, you could protest the actions of the majority, which they did, and they were all

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Lutherans, and the result was those who protested became known as Protestants, and that's where the name came from.

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So when you talk about Catholics and Protestants, it's interesting, in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, primarily a political understanding.

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When you talk to, you know, I've been to Dublin a few times and when you talk to people there,

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Protestant is much more political than it is theological. For us, it's much more theological than it is political, but initially, it was a mixture of both, but it was primarily political.

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The minority filed this protest against the actions of the majority, and the resultant terminology was

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Protestants, and a lot of people think, oh, they were protesting Rome and its abuses. No, they're actually protesting the political process in the

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Holy Roman Empire in regards to the majority, so that's just how that works. So, those are the various diets, and so they start early on and they're continuing on even in the time of the

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Reformation. So diets also addressed religious or theological issues.

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Why? Because we've already seen the developing concept, and it continues,

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I mean, if it's called the Holy Roman Empire, you sort of get an idea of where it's going, but this continues the concept of sacralism, state church,

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Constantinianism, I may have put it like Constantinianism, yeah, that's right, all the rest of this stuff which you see at this time period.

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So, that's what's going on pretty much on the political realm in Europe. If we had more time, and I had more time to do more study, a case can be made that even when we're consciously attempting to provide a balanced view of church history, it's not that this is the only place where the church exists.

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I do have a couple small books about the church in the east, things that are going on as far away as, there's some evidence that around this time there was an incredibly strong church in China that just sort of, poof, disappears.

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There's, the church has spread down into Africa, and it is a sad reality of history that we have a lot more information about what happened in Europe than we have in other places, and a lot more interest, to be honest with you, than what happened in Europe and in other places, but it's not that this is the only place where there was things taking place that are relevant to Christ's church, it's just what has survived best.

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Yes, sir? Is the church in Africa mostly in Ethiopia? Actually, it went farther south than that, but certainly there is a strong church there.

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You know, Islam takes over northern Africa, and there remains churches under Islamic rule, but it had gone farther south than that, and it's just, a lot of those areas aren't big on documentary history, and so it's hard to go very far back and verify things, you get a lot of traditions, a lot of oral stuff that may or may not represent what actually happened.

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And it's, as you know, history is a rather interesting thing to try to dig into the farther back you go.

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Now, some of you may recall that we talked about the beginning of monasticism, we talked about the

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Desert Fathers and some of the things there. You can't tell the story of medieval

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Christendom, the educational system, the passing on of literary works, the copying of manuscripts, without talking about monasteries, because they became absolutely central to, well, to the whole cultural system of that time period.

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Just as the castle might be central to the political and legal structure of the day, the monastery, births, deaths, everything else were connected to the monasteries and to the people in the monasteries, et cetera, et cetera.

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And much of the education, when there was any education, was associated with the monasteries as well.

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It was also the missions concept during this time period is that you would set up a monastery as a missions base, and people would go out from there.

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You had the vow of poverty, the vow of celibacy in the West, not in the

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East, the vow of obedience to the abbot, and of course these monasteries were extremely important in the production of manuscripts, which remain important to us to this day.

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How big were these monasteries? Well, it depended. Larger for men than for women.

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Some of the studies would indicate maybe 20 to 35 average for men, 6 to 20 average for women.

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So these are not, you know, sometimes from some of the movies you see these big, huge, massive structures and you think there's hundreds and hundreds of people there.

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It wasn't. It was a smaller group. Now, during this time you have the development of what's called the

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Rule of St. Benedict, which provided a lot of the behavioral and daily activities of those that would be in the monastery, which would include a clock of prayers, even more rigorous than what the

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Muslims came up with, especially, you know, the Muslims have what's called the Fajr prayer, which during the summer can be as early as 3 something in the morning, like 3 .55

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in the morning or something like that. The Benedictine clock of the day,

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I don't think you could ever get more than 3 hours of sleep at one point in time according to that clock.

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There were prayers at midnight and like 3 a .m. and it was all through the day.

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Some of the forms of this discipline also included a pretty much complete silence in the community, especially when the community was gathered together.

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So for times of meals, if you wanted the corn, you had to develop some way of making that known through facial expressions because you couldn't say, pass the corn.

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It doesn't work that way. There would be silence and a very strict set of prayer times and things along those lines.

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Now as for the women, the life of the nun, she normally came from upper classes, gave a dowry to the nunnery.

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Her routine emphasized contemplation, was broken up into seven offices, began at 2 a .m.

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in the morning. I'm not sure how you kept track of all this with great accuracy to be honest with you, but got back up at 6 a .m.

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The last was either 9 p .m. or 12 a .m. So you figure that out, there's only a couple places you can string 3 hours in there together unless you take a nap during the day, which you weren't supposed to do.

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Three meals, bread and ale, a solid lunch and a light dinner, silence at meals, 12 to 5 p .m.

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was the work time. Nunneries had visitors who might educate the girls, an important source of income.

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Sometimes had boarding houses for well -to -do wives. The nun's dress was plain.

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And it is interesting that the records of this time do indicate that they had a running battle with the bishops over one extremely important issue, whether you could have pets in your rooms.

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Obviously the bishops weren't big on this and the nuns were very big on this.

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And so I would imagine that would mean that some of the greatest disobedience to the abbots was in sneaking a kitten into your cell and keeping a pet in your room.

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When we look at the development in regards to discipline and education between 600 and 800, there is a real decline.

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Remember the Carolingian Renaissance right at the end of that period, so that sort of explains that.

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How do we know? Well, in the documents that we have in that time period, there's a shift from Latin to whatever the local language was, which would seem to indicate that even the people in the monasteries were not keeping up with education to where they could not even communicate in Latin any longer.

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They had to use the local language, which would have been everyone's sort of local tongue.

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Monastic reform was needed at this time because of a number of problems. First there was simony, the buying and selling of church offices.

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And that's going to be something that is absolutely rampant and eventually just pretty much accepted up through the

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Council of Trent. So the Council of Trent starts in 1546. So for centuries, it is simply a given.

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Everybody knows that, especially in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, the papacy is bought and sold.

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It's whatever cardinal has the most money, can arrange the most loans to be able to pay the most to get the papacy.

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Everybody knows it. Common knowledge. It's as common knowledge as Donald Trump tweets.

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I think everybody knows that. If that was a shock to you, I think you need to get out a little bit more.

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Anyway, next there was nepotism, giving favors to relatives and friends.

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Again, once we get the Reformation, there will be lots of discussion about nepotism and one of the biggest flashpoints in the

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Reformation itself is Albrecht, the Archbishop of Mainz, has to borrow money to buy the

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Archbishopric. And it's his having to pay off the loan that leads to John Tetzel preaching indulgences in Saxony, which leads to the 95

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Theses, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all connected together. But there's a tremendous amount of nepotism.

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And it was not uncommon for literally hundreds of years for a major city to have as a bishop a nine -year -old kid that happens to be the illegitimate son of a more powerful clergy person from another city.

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And so the alleged spiritual head of the area in which you might live, you just knew that's just a monetary position.

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If you're looking for any type of spiritual guidance, you're not going to be looking to the bishop. And that ends up impacting your view of the church.

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No matter what you say, it does. Next was concubinage.

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Concubinage. Try to spell that one three times fast. Having a woman who did not have the privilege of marriage but was immorally involved.

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And so those who are powerful had concubines. These would be women who would bury your children and take care of your home.

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But because technically you had taken the vow of celibacy, and everybody knew that you were doing that, could not have the solid foundation of the commitment of marriage, shall we say.

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And there's so many people when you look down through history, just so many people down through history who were illegitimate children of priests and popes and everything else.

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Sarasmus was the illegitimate son of a Roman priest himself.

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And so he had to get a special dispensation to become a priest himself. So there was a tremendous amount of concubinage, and everybody knew that while the people in the

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West said that they believed in this discipline of an unmarried clergy, there were very few clergy who were actually celibate.

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Then there was worldliness, often caused by the church's control of property.

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How did the church get property? If you're committed to a rule that basically says you can't own property and you're supposed to have taken a vow of poverty, how'd monasteries, for example, end up owning most of the land around the monastery?

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Well, it's a mixture. It's a theological reason, really.

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Going back to Gregory I, Gregory the Great, as pope, you may recall, we mentioned is one of the major steps toward the modern doctrine of purgatory.

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Still not as fully developed as what you're going to get dogmatically in the 1400s from Rome, but a move toward it.

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And so, especially during the medieval period, you began to get this concept of the treasury of merit, and we'll look more fully at this later on.

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It's only beginning to develop at this time. But the idea was that people who had land and money feared how long they were going to be spending in purgatory.

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And so what they would do is they would endow, they would give a gift of land and money to the monastery, specifically so that daily masses and prayers would be said for their soul.

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To try to speed the amount of time that they were suffering in purgatory. And so over time, you'd have all these reformation movements in the monasteries, to where we'd get rid of all worldly attachments, get rid of all the stuff that's distracting us from the spiritual life.

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But then, okay, now you've got your reformation going, and along comes a believing parishioner.

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And he's got lands and money, and he's not feeling so good. He's getting to that age.

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And so he says, I want to give a certain portion of my property and my income, my gold, to the monastery in return for the promise that a mass will be said in my name for my benefit.

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And it didn't have to be you. That sounds really super selfish, but that's frequently what would happen if you're the one dying.

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But you'd do it for your wife, or your parents, or your grandparents, or someone really close to you, whatever.

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And you'd give these gifts to the monasteries, and pretty soon you're having to assign one of the brothers to take care of the books, and act as a little bank.

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And when land is given, well, someone's got to go see what's going on in the land, and try to improve it, and collect rent from people who live on it.

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And before long, what had once been a reform movement, now all of a sudden is taken up with worldly things, and money, and land, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And hey, when you're the guy taking care of it, you can have a nicer monk robe.

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While you're traveling, maybe you can stop at the inn and get a real nice meal. It's a whole lot better when they've got the monastery, and that's just sort of how it works.

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Okay, yeah.

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Alright, so there was a great decline in discipline, just as we have in this room. And it can happen quickly, too.

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Very quickly. Sometimes you can't even see it coming. Sometimes they don't even raise their hands before the discipline breaks down.

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So, finally there was a great decline this time in discipline.

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I'm wondering where it was, but it may be a little bit later on. One of the favorite stories that my church history professor told us was, one of the documents about the decline in discipline was that there was a, they found one document that was complaining that the monks who got to sit in the balcony during the mass were dripping wax in their candles on the bare heads of the monks down below.

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So, it had to sit on the ground floor. And this was just part of the, you know, so the nuns have cats and the monks are playing wax games.

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It's not a good thing. So, during this time, one of the big names has nothing to do with actors because it's spelled differently, but you have the reforms at Cluny.

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William of Aquitaine founded a monastery at Cluny. The Cluny system involved interconnected monasteries rather than independent ones, so it was sort of the amway of the ancient world amongst monasteries.

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And each abbot was assigned by the abbot of Cluny. So, this did provide, well, look, this kind of system has advantages and disadvantages.

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It has the advantage of maintaining consistency, and as long as the central controlling power remains focused on keeping things going the right direction, then it can do that.

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Unfortunately, as history tells us, once you start getting corruption, because that central power can become very, very, very powerful, the more people you're controlling, the more power you have, and hence the more money, it can also be a mechanism of spreading undiscipline or error or heresy or whatever else it might be.

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So, the reforms at Cluny brought people back to teaching in Latin and addressed a lot of the issues where, during the darkest of the

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Dark Ages, things had gone south. Now, if you want the real

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Dark Ages, we have something called, as Philip Schaaf calls it, the

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Pornocracy. 901 to 1046. That's almost 150 years.

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The 10th and first half of the 11th century saw the degradation of the Roman Papacy to the lowest possible levels.

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Only later, under the Borgia Popes, the Borgia Popes were really interesting guys.

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That's around the time of Luther, actually. He saw one of the Borgia Popes in 1510, as I recall.

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Would similar degradation be seen as to what you see here, but on a different level. It is difficult to express without sounding like one who is exaggerating the depth to which the papacy sunk at this time.

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It was controlled at times by women of uncontrolled lust and sexual debauchery, who installed and deposed popes at their whim.

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At other times, it was controlled completely by money or by political intrigue. And almost every single person who occupied the chair of Peter during this time was, from any biblical standard, an utter non -Christian.

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The worst example of this is found in John XII, 955 to 963.

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John XII, 955 to 963. He became pope at the ripe old age of 18.

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To quote Philip Schaff, quote, he was one of the most immoral and wicked popes, ranking with Bandict IX, John XXIII, and Alexander VI.

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He was charged by Roman Synod, no one contradicting, no one contradicting, with almost every crime of which human nature is capable and deposed as a monster of iniquity, end quote.

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What kind of charges is Schaff referring to? He provides a note. Quote, this is volume four, page 287, if you'd like to look it up yourself.

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Among the charges of the Synod against him were that he appeared constantly armed with sword, lance, helmet, and breastplate, that he neglected matins and vespers, that he never signed himself the sign of the cross, that he was fond of hunting, that he had made a boy of ten years of age a bishop and ordained a bishop or deacon in a stable, that he had mutilated a priest and he had set houses on fire, like Nero, that he had committed homicide.

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I'm not sure about you, but when you get a list of charges that goes from he didn't pray matin prayer and he killed people,

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I'm not really sure, you know, exactly how you fit those two together, but there you go, that he had committed homicide and adultery, had violated virgins and widows high and low, lived with his father's mistress, converted the pontifical palace into a brothel, drank to the health of the devil, and invoked at the gambling table the help of Jupiter and Venus and other heathen demons.

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Well, I'm not sure that asking for the saints' help at that time would be all that much better, but the

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Emperor Otho would not believe these enormities until they were proven, but the bishops replied that they were matters of public notoriety requiring no proof.

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Before the Synod convened, John XII had made his escape from Rome, carrying with him the portable part of the treasury of St.

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Peter, but after the departure of the Emperor, he was readmitted to the city, restored for a short time, and killed in an act of adultery by the enraged husband of his paramour."

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End quote. So there you go. Alrighty. John XII.

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So it sort of makes me wonder a little bit why any modern pope would take

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John XXVIII or whatever else when you know that the XII was like the biggest scoundrel in the history of the papacy, but I know

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Roman Catholics who go, actually that's evidence of the truthfulness of the Church, because if we've survived that, we can survive anything.

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Okay. If you want to go there. Ninety years later, because remember this is 150 years.

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Ninety years later, a boy of only 12 years of age was made pope as the result of a mere monetary deal between two families who at that time controlled the papacy.

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Taking the name of Benedict IX. Didn't we just have Benedict XVI? Yeah. Ratzinger was

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Benedict XVI, so here's Benedict IX. Twelve years old. This youth grew worse and worse with each passing year.

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He committed murder and adultery in broad daylight, impervious to prosecution, as his brother was patrician of the city.

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That would be the district attorney. He was guilty of every kind of crime, including theft and rape.

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He was expelled from the city only to return and take up his position again. He sold the papacy for one or two thousand pounds of silver to an arch presbyter in 1045 after he had emptied the papal treasury of everything he could find.

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In 1047 he came back though, ruining the deal he had made and sat as pope for another year until 1048 when the people of Rome finally kicked him out for good.

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So bad was the situation in Rome that when Reformation finally did take place and the synod met to try to reestablish some semblance of order in the papacy, not a single

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Roman clergy could be found in the entire city who was not guilty of simony and fornication.

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They had to go to a bishop of Bomberg to find a person worthy to sit in the chair of Peter.

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Aside from the gross evil that has found the papacy at this time, another issue is plainly presented by this century and a half of debauchery.

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How can anyone seriously claim that there is an unpolluted direct line of succession from Peter to the present pope?

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What could possibly constitute a sufficiently egregious breach to ever disrupt such a line of succession?

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And that really is the issue. Back right around 2000 or so, 99 or 2000, after a while the years start all melding together.

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Those of you with a little more white understand exactly what I'm talking about. Back there somewhere

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I did two debates in one year with Roman Catholic apologists

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Tim Staples and Robert St. Genes. And they were both on the subject of papal infallibility.

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And what was interesting was Staples being the more, I was going to say traditional, but actually that has different meaning in Roman Catholicism, mainline of the apologists, came up with an excuse for every statement, whether it was a false teaching or whatever else you can come up with in regards to a pope of the past.

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My experience in dealing with the concept of papal infallibility is it's the most worthless doctrine ever invented.

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Because here's how it functions. If what the pope says is right according to the current pope, then he was infallible.

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If it was wrong, then he wasn't speaking as pope. Okay, well that's really how there is to that. Which means that the current pope, you don't know whether what he's saying is going to be consistent with the next pope, so it's irrelevant whether it's true or false.

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You have no way of knowing. It's a dogma without a reason or a function.

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And so Tim Staples was like, oh no, there's an excuse for each one of these. Honorius is teaching, he wasn't really teaching as a pope, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And a few months later I debated St. Janus, who had heard the previous debate. And he didn't try to come up with strange excuses like that.

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He just simply said there were a lot of popes who weren't Christians. A lot of popes were heretics. But, as long as you're the pope, the

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Holy Spirit of God will not allow you to teach as dogma something that is false. So if there was anything ever taught, it wasn't being taught as dogma.

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But he didn't even defend the idea that all the popes had been Christians. So, there you go.

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So you put together all the intrigues in the early church, and then you put together the pornocracy, and then you put together what we'll see later on, called the

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Babylonian captivity of the church, the Avignon Papacy, the fact that there's a period of time where you have two or as many as three popes.

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You put all that together, and the whole idea of an unbroken line, absolutely impossible.

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Just, it's fantasy. And yet there are many people who believe it, absolutely.

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So, the next time that we are together, I can tell you exactly what we'll start off with, if I remember.

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And that is a major event in church history. I've already mentioned it a couple of times, but it's one of those things that is on the final.

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And that is the Great Split of 1054. The Great Split between East and West of 1054 will be the next thing that we are going to look at.

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Alright? I don't remember, what number are we on now? We are on 43. So this was 43?

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Yes sir. Okay, this was lesson 43. So we're only eight or nine lessons behind the entirety of the series

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I did last time. And we haven't even gotten to the Reformation yet, which will take a long time. So, either

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I'm getting much slower in my old age, or we're talking about a whole lot more than we did the first time through.

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So, there you go. Alright, let's go to the time of the Word of Prayer. Father, once again, we do thank you for this opportunity to look back upon your dealings with the people.

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We look back and we see the things that were wrong. We see things that were right. We ask that you would help us to discern, to learn, and to grow.