History of Christian Europe

R. Evans G.

Description

How did Christianity come to have such an extraordinary influence upon Europe? Beginning with the transmission of Jesus - teaching throughout the Roman world, Gillian Evans shows how Christianity transformed not only the thinking but also the structures of society, in a Christendom that was, until relatively modern times, essentially a "European" phenomenon. She traces Christianity's influence across the centuries, from its earliest days, through the East/West schism, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, to its development in the scientific age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its place in the modern world. The History of Christian Europe will appeal to scholars of religion and history who are seeking a fuller understanding of how Christianity helped shape and define Europe and, consequently, the wider world.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 23 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912552108
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE HISTORY OF
CHRISTIAN EUROPE
Gillian R. Evans
 
Text copyright © 2008 Gillian R. Evans This edition copyright © 2018 Lion Hudson IP Limited
The right of Gillian R. Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Hudson Limited Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Business Park Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www .lionhudson .com
ISBN 978 1 9125 5209 2 e-ISBN 978 1 9125 5210 8
First hardback edition 2008 First paperback edition 2009
Acknowledgments Scripture quotations taken from the New English Bible copyright © 1961, 1970 by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Cover image: Florence, Italy, Duomo Santa Maria Del Fiore © BullStorm / istockphoto.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
 
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Christianity and Europe’s Sense of Identity
2. How Europe Became Christian
3. East and West Draw Apart
4. The High Middle Ages
5. The Reformation in the West
6. Early Modern Expansion and Conflict
7. Christianity and the European Scientific Revolution
8. Christian Europe in the Modern World
Conclusion
Bibliography and Works Cited
Index
 
INTRODUCTION
‘Why write history?’ was a simpler question in pre-Christian Europe. The answer which tended to be given was in terms of recording heroic achievements. Herodotus, the historian of ancient Greece (b. c. 484 BC ), says at the opening of his histories that his purpose is to ensure that the great deeds of men are not lost to memory. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC – AD 17) had no such difficulty. He says in the Preface to his history of Rome that he is setting out simply to record the achievements of the Roman people from the foundation of their city.
This approach did not die away altogether with the advent of Christianity. It still appeared in the writing of the lives of saints, who were held up as examples for imitation. But a grander conspectus opened up, in which history merged with philosophy and theology. Questions had also been asked by ancient philosophers about the purpose of the world and whether anyone was in control of the final outcome of world events, but for Christian thinkers those questions were most naturally answered in terms of the providential plan of an omnipotent and wholly good God.
The church had a written history quite early on. Eusebius of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340, bishop of Caesarea from at least AD 315) conceived the idea of writing a history of the church, mainly in the East and mainly in the form of a compilation of extracts from the writings of others, but others took up the idea and began to create a historiographical tradition. The first Christian historians thought of themselves as continuing ‘salvation history’, the narrative of God’s dealings with humankind as set out in the Bible. This had begun before time and would continue after the end of time, into eternity. This was the approach Augustine of Hippo ( AD 354–430) took in his City of God , completed early in the fifth century, in which he was faced with the embarrassing task of explaining to articulate, well-educated pagan refugees from Italy, who had arrived in north Africa in flight from the barbarian invaders, how God could possibly have intended the fall of a Christian empire. The answer he gave was that Christians needed to take the long view: in God’s plan for the world the fall of the Roman empire was a comparatively minor moment.
The same approach of looking at the story on a grand scale, which went beyond history in time and included eternity, was worked out with particular enthusiasm in the twelfth century by Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), Anselm of Havelberg (c. 1100–1158) and especially Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), whose prophetic writings sought to put a date on the end of the world. They all read the Bible as a story told in three ages, of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively. The secular context faded behind this Christianized account of not only what had happened in the history of the world but also the reasons why it had happened.
In the early modern world Christian writing about the past began to mutate into a more human-centred view of historical progress. Europeans ‘discovered’ the New World and new ways of studying new topics became fashionable. It was difficult for Europeans not to see themselves as advancing. In England the ‘Whig’ view of history thought of human civilization as progressive (with Whig politics at the apex of the development).
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) wrote a Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830) in which he postulated that humanity had experienced three ages of development. The first had been the theological, which he regarded as ‘fictitious’. The second had been the age of metaphysical or rational and philosophical thinking. The present age was the age of science. This became a fashionable subject.
Yet the notion that ‘modern science’ must somehow supersede an earlier approach to life in which religion forms a significant strand was not new. The battle for dominance between ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ (which used reason alone) and ‘religion’ (which involved faith) and the vexed question of how they are to coexist is to be observed in Europe in every Christian century.
Literature and the arts come into it too. This is an aspect of the problem with which Jerome (c. AD 345–420) was wrestling in the fourth century, when he felt that the temptation to read the secular classics was a dangerous distraction from his concentration on studies connected with the Christian faith. When Guibert of Nogent (1053–1124) guiltily read secular poetry under the bedclothes in the late eleventh century he was grappling with the same problem.
Our story in this book concerns the way Christian Europe came to have its extraordinary influence upon the world. The teaching of Jesus, which he never wrote down himself, survived and was carried throughout the Roman world, transforming not only the thinking but also the structures of society, in a Christendom which was, until relatively modern times, essentially a ‘European’ phenomenon. It was a phenomenon which helped to define Europe itself and to drive its civilization and its activities in the directions which have stamped it with its Christian shape. One of the questions which this book seeks to answer is how this happened, and what it has meant for the peoples of Europe and the wider world; for, since the sixteenth century, Europe has been increasingly engaged with a world much bigger geographically than the range of its own small territories.
 
CHAPTER 1
CHRISTIANITY AND EUROPE’S SENSE OF IDENTITY
Although the European Community is still growing, Europe is physically very small in proportion to its historical importance and its influence in the modern world. On the map of the world, as a modern geographer sees it, Europe occupies a tiny corner of the Eurasian land mass, naturally bounded by the sea on every side except to the East, where the boundary with the continent of Asia has been the subject of political and religious dispute. The British Isles are separated by sea from the European mainland by twenty miles or so at the narrowest point. Iceland is often included in Europe, though it is remote from its main territories.
The problem of determining the boundary between Europe and Asia presented itself quite forcefully to early Christians. Orosius (c. AD 385–420) discusses it in his book Against the Pagans . Russia reaches far into Asia, but European Russia begins at the Ural mountains. The border runs south a little uncertainly, down to the Caspian Sea, along the mountains of the Caucasus or perhaps the Kura River, and on to the Black Sea, where it runs though the Dardanelles. Then the sea provides a continuing natural boundary to the Middle East down to the Suez Canal and the beginning of Africa. The exact point where Europe becomes Asia is viewed differently by geographers of different nationalities, the Russian view, for example, tending to put the Caucasus in Asia. The dual-continent aspect of Russia was still a point of interest in the seventeenth century, when ‘Europian Tartars’ are mentioned (1603).
Looked at from outside the ‘world’ of Europe, it is not obvious that Europe is entitled to be considered a continent at all. Sometimes it has been called a peninsula of Eurasia, and some of the migrant Indo-European peoples who moved west into Europe treated it as though that was exactly what it was. There are important – and topical – questions today about the influence Asian civilizations had upon the formation of Europe at this early stage and later; why ‘Europe’ ended geographically where it did; and how far there was an interpenetration of cultures between the civilizations of the East and those of the European West. In other words, what does it mean, culturally and geographically, to talk of ‘East’ and ‘West’? The answers began to change, first with the coming of Christianity and secondly with the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD .
The Idea of Europe
Europe has not always been seen in the way it is on a modern map, as a distinctively shaped tract of territory with the physical and human geography in position. Throughout most of the history of Europe, the exact lie of the land could be mapped only roughly by the standards of modern cartography. More importantly, Europe has been an idea, part of an explanation of the world, and Christian apologists have entered enthusiastically into that process. So before we begin on the story of the way Christianity emerged in Europe and the effect it has had, we ne