Christianity played an enormously important role in Western European history, especially after 313, when Constantine officially allowed Christians to openly worship in the Roman Empire. Only a century later, the empire started to disintegrate under the pressure of wave after wave of invasion by “barbarians” from the north and the east of the Rhine and the Danube rivers. If Constantine had not supported the Christian Church to develop as it did before the barbarian invasions and implosion of the empire, Christianity might have become just a historical curiosity or a minor contemporary religion. Some have been tempted to say that a purely chance sequence of events explains the predominance of Christianity in Western European intellectual history. What is indisputable, nonetheless, is that Christianity was predominant in intellectual as well as social and political life.
The Medieval Mind, a Roman Catholic Christian mind, developed and dominated during these nearly eight centuries, 400-1200. Our Modern Mind can hardly comprehend the Medieval Mind, in great part thanks to the anti-Catholic, even anti-Christian historians (notably Edward S. Gibbon for the English-speaking world), who have defined these centuries for us as the Dark Ages, in which nothing good could possibly have happened.
Most historians now agree that it is simply illogical to pretend that the Modern Mind that emerged through the process of Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment could have arisen from an eight-century vacuum. In fact, historians have used their deep knowledge of the Middle Ages to overturn the popular notion that Christianity has always been an indomitable foe of human reason and progress. In fact, Western Christianity became the Authority that overarched all other authority for so many centuries because it fostered reason and progress.
However, historians do not expect us to believe that medieval leaders, despite the overarching authority of the Church, lived up to the ideals of Christian morality. In fact, the leaders, even of the Church, very often were irrational, hostile to the dignity of the individual person, and determined to thwart progress—to put it mildly!
Once the empire had crumbled, all that was left was a diminished population with a shrinking economy shattered into hundreds of isolated pieces and a memory of the imperial system, of which only the still-relatively-new state religion, the Roman version of Christianity, remained just barely standing. The Roman Church had no choice but to accommodate the barbarians in all their loathsomeness.
From the chaos, an awkward collaboration of Christian officials and barbarian overlords built the “feudal system” with its three “estates”—the landed nobility, the Church, and everyone else, who did the hard work. The feudal system had its origins partly in the Germanic custom of comitatus, in which a heroic warrior was surrounded by other proven warriors who gained honor through their valorous military service to their hero-chief, as well as first pick of the spoils of victory in battle.
Kenneth R. Bartlett, history professor at the University of Toronto, offered the colorful analogy of these Germanic warrior alliances to modern biker gangs—in the absence of any effective state apparatus, they could do pretty much as they pleased, with no constraints other than their own code of ethics.[1] Bartlett called this “public power in private hands.” However, to enjoy the spoils of their victory, these strong men (kings) and their henchmen (nobles) had to prepare for defense against the next wave of barbarians as well as the miscreants of their own tribe.
And they had to eat! Without money to pay for the military service of the nobles, the king had to offer them control of food-producing land and the people who would work it for them. So, with the collaboration of the Church (presumed to be essential for gaining the cooperation of the Third Estate), these “biker gangs” settled on the land and developed the feudal system and the “manorial economy.”
The stirrup, one of the many prosaic inventions of the Middle Ages, made it possible to fight on horseback when protected by heavy armor and when using high-impact lances and other heavy weapons. The warriors became knights, the fearsome medieval equivalent of modern military tanks. The care and feeding of a knight and his horse “takes a village” and enough good land to feed and clothe both the knight’s family and the villagers and their priest, who all benefited from the knight’s protection from outsiders.
This was the “manor” over which the knight ruled as he chose to rule, constrained only by the web of customary practice and mutual obligation that governed nobility and villagers alike, with the blessing and help of the Christian authorities. The king provided the land and people to support the knight and in return had the right to call upon his knights to gather in defense of the kingdom or to attack other kingdoms. Otherwise, the knight was the lord of his own manor, with little support or interference from other knights.
The manor was a self-contained and self-supported economic and social unit. All administration, economy and social life itself was supremely local and, in the best of times, mostly isolated from the rest of the world. Trade among these local units was hampered not only by marauding bandits and lack of roads and bridges but also by lack of money—literally no currency with widely recognized value.
Some of these local units were abbeys—spiritual communities of monks (monasteries) or nuns (convents), most organized according to the Rule of St. Benedict. Their number exploded in the period 550-700. The phenomenal growth no doubt reflected the pervasive esteem for Christianity as well as the need to protect its traditions and learning from the barbarian onslaught—and for many, of course, the opportunity to take refuge from the danger and hard work experienced by most people of the time.
An abbey was the fortified great house of a manor, supported in the same way as a knight and his castle, by a village and land worked by the villagers for the benefit of the abbey’s residents. Often the monks and nuns themselves worked very hard, too, along with the villagers, to support the manorial economy and protect life and property from marauders. Moreover, the abbeys were responsible for much of the remarkable inventiveness of the Middle Ages and for the preservation and advancement of learning and arts.
This feudal system lasted so long because it met the needs of people bereft of the protection and administration of a larger government. It was most developed in France, England and Germany but similar forms were widespread throughout the former Roman Empire. It worked especially well when it was still a meritocracy, with the bravest, most capable warriors becoming knights and the most spiritually committed Christians becoming priests, monks and nuns, thereby justifying the privileges and honor yielded to them by the Third Estate in exchange for their protection and assistance in the secular and spiritual worlds.
Over the centuries, however, meritocracy corroded into aristocracy. A knight’s investment in the years of training and equipment needed to prepare his successor was most efficiently focused on the knight’s own sons. And to maintain the minimum size necessary for a manor to support a knight and his family and horse and so on, the “law of primogeniture” arose to forbid the knight from dividing his manor among his sons. From these practical constraints arose the cultural assumption that succession was the eldest son’s birthright, often in spite of rather than because of the son’s level of competence.
Surplus sons were destined to join the Church, as the only respectable alternative profession for the sons of nobility. While members of the Third Estate could become priests and advance up the ranks of the Church, the privileged status of the nobility adhered to the sons who joined the Church, so that privileged positions of status within the Church, especially the offices of bishop and abbot, were mostly given to those born of noble families.
Since the boys typically did not freely choose to join the Church, they were not dependably pious or even of good moral character. For both knights and leaders of the Church, moral leadership and self-sacrifice for the common good, even administrative competence, too often melted away, leaving only the seeking and protection of privilege and luxury.
Church collaboration in the feudal system institutionalized a contradiction—between the ideal of the Christian life (loving and serving God and each other as God’s children, each an invaluable part of the mystical body of Christ) and the Roman and barbarian reality (violence met with violence, and might made the right to enforce a rigid hierarchy of status, rights and privileges).
In retrospect, it is easy for us to foresee the danger in religious leaders (promoters of the ideal life) taking responsibility for the messy job of creating and maintaining civic order. But only some of the religious could exercise the monastic option to attempt withdrawal from the real world. The rest, from the popes to the parish priests, had to find a way to work with and even support the emerging social and political order, no matter how far it was from the Christian ideal. The danger, of course, is guilt by association. If you undertake to fix it, you often end up owning it. After centuries, the Church was thoroughly entangled with the feudal system.
This baked-in contradiction at the heart of the feudal system would play out over many, many centuries, even well beyond the Middle Ages. The intimate alliance of the English nobility and the Church of England was a legacy of the feudal system. Though increasingly weakened in political clout and cultural influence, this alliance continued to structure British society up to and throughout Queen Victoria’s reign. Both the Darwins and the Wedgwoods were among the nouveau riche seeking social status as landed gentry, and what they sought was elevated position in a social hierarchy inherited from the feudal system.
Let’s stop again and observe that medieval Latin Christianity was, on one hand, a belief system, a moral compass, and a worldview, and on the other hand, an institutional structure charged with secular responsibilities to huge numbers of diverse people and staffed with these very same people caught between the demands of the secular and spiritual worlds they sought to serve. Human frailty and institutional exigencies were constant corrosive forces within the church. The success or failure to counter those forces was testimony neither for nor against the truth or falsity of the Christian story, its belief system, its moral compass, or its worldview.
[1] Bartlett, Kenneth R. The Development of European Civilization. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, Course No. 8215, 2011. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/development-of-european-civilization.