The Spread of Christianity in the Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, people begin to glorify reason as the God-given tool for investigating faith. Instead of going on faith alone, they were using reason to back up that faith. Many assertions by reason-based Christians were dubbed heresy by church leaders. This was because more and more Christian thinkers were complaining about the materialistic ways of church leaders.

This was a time when the church leaders would sell or buy high-ranking offices in the church, and they would gain land or money from that. The church leaders had become known as materialistic and greedy. They weren’t living the Christian life that they were supposed to be setting a good example for.

When these Christian thinkers called them out on it, the church leaders’ response was to say “This is heresy. This is not true. This is something you shouldn’t believe at all. You should just listen to us. Anything they say is completely wrong.” Of course, the church leaders aren’t going to agree that they were too materialistic and that they should change, because they really liked the system they had in place.

These Christian thinkers were spreading and growing. There were more and more of them that were coming to think with reason instead of just believing everything the church leaders said. Thomas Aquinas was a leading Christian thinker of the Middle Ages. His Summa Theologica gave reason-based explanations for belief in God and Christian miracles.

He actually listed out a lot of explanations for why it makes sense to believe in God. Why some of the customer oracles make sense or what they could’ve been representing instead. The reason-based Christians responded to that. He was a very popular Christian thinker at that time. He really stuck out to the other people who were joining that group.

The spread of reason-based Christianity also spurred the formation of universities. Young men started moving to large cities to study theology, law, and medicine. This was the first time that this was happening, that people were traveling to all go learn at one spot in Western Europe. This was a big jump forward, because now you were going to have more educated citizens, citizens that were specializing in certain schools of thought.

Christian mystics also developed during this period. The Christian mystics believe they could achieve the union with God through self-denial, contemplative prayer, and almsgiving. Self-denial being fasting of certain things, whether it be food or drink or if they had a certain hobby they liked to do, say someone liked to go horseback riding or someone liked to cook or to sew, they would give that up.

Anything that they wanted they would give up and self-denial. They would have contemplative prayer and they would give alms. Through those things, they believed they could achieve union with God before actually dying and going to heaven. We had the reason-based Christians spreading, growing. That school of thought was getting stronger. Tensions between the church and the government continued.

Around 1300, strong monarchs and a spirit of nationalism were weakening the power of the pope in political affairs. You’ve got strong monarchs, you’ve got strong leaders of the government, you have people having a renewed sense of nationalism where they feel very patriotic toward their government, toward their country, and those things were weakening the power of the pope, who was the leader of the church, in political affairs.

The fact that you had all these Christian thinkers now, these reason-based Christians that were saying “Hey, the church leaders are actually doing a lot of things badly” was going to also add to the weakening of the pope, since the pope was the leader of the church leaders who were not doing what they were supposed to do in the church.

People were going to turn more to those strong monarchs and to their country during this time. Pope Boniface VIII tried to force kings to obey him. Things weren’t going very well for the pope. Things weren’t going well for the church, so Pope Boniface tried to force kings to obey him to get back some of that power. He issued a papal bill in 1296 instructing King Philip IV of France not to tax the church.

Again, the church was being greedy. The church didn’t want to give up any of this money that it was earning selling out these positions in high-ranking officials in the church. They said, “Oh, King of France don’t tax us. We’re issuing this order for you not to do it.” Philip ignored this command and continued to refuse any claims or commands of the pope.

He eventually got tired of hearing the Pope say “Oh, Philip needs to do this. Philip needs to do that. Philip is not going to be the official king because the pope says so,” so Philip decided to silence Boniface. He didn’t kill him or anything, but he did kidnap him and bring him to France. He figured if the pope wasn’t in Rome doing his job there, he would lose more power and he would be silenced.

No one was going to be listening to him anymore. Boniface was able to escape, but he died soon after his escape. Once he died, this greatly weakened the political power of the papacy. The fact that the pope was able to be kidnapped, and then this Pope Boniface who had been issuing all these commands and being ignored, then he got kidnapped and then he died.

All of that served to further weaken the political power of the papacy. In 1305 Philip IV of France, the same Philip from up here, talked the Council of Cardinals into selecting a French archbishop as the next pope. This pope, Pope Clement V, moved the papacy to Avignon, France. Just because he was a French archbishop didn’t mean that he would have to rule from France.

Ordinarily, the pope was going to live in rural from Rome. The fact that he moved the papacy to Avignon was a big deal, because their pope hadn’t lived outside of Rome before now, or at least ruled outside of Rome. A lot of people regarded him as an anti-Pope. They didn’t want to recognize him because he wasn’t in Rome. He did rule from Avignon, France.

The papacy moved to Avignon, France and ruled up there as the only pope from 1305 to 1378. In 1378, a new pope was chosen who moved the papacy back to Rome. We spent some time with the papacy in France. A lot of people were kind of iffy about it, didn’t want to recognize that Pope, but he was the only pope that was being recognized for that period.

Then, in 1378, this new pope was chosen who moved the papacy back to Rome. The French didn’t like this, so 13 French cardinals selected a new French Pope who was going to rule from Avignon. Now there were two popes, each claiming the other was illegitimate. This pope originally chosen moved the papacy back to Rome. French didn’t like it.

13 French cardinals said, “Okay, we’re going to select our own new French Pope.” That one was going to stay in Avignon. Now you’ve got your pope in Rome and your pope in Avignon. Both of them said the other was illegitimate. The other one was not really the pope. This period was known as the Papal Schism, or Western Schism, because the Roman Church was basically split, or divided.

It lasted from 1378 until 1417. It went on for a while with there being two popes in two different locations, but in 1417, or really from 1414 to 1418, there was a council that convened to reunite the church under one pope. It took a while, but eventually both the Roman and Avignon popes stepped down because they were both in favor of reuniting the church. A new pope was elected by the council.

Christianity evolved a lot during the Middle Ages. It went from being faith-based under church leaders that had become corrupt, and the Christians decided to start looking into reason and basing more of their religion on reason instead of just faith. They started calling out those corrupt church leaders and the church gradually lost some power. It became divided but was eventually reunited.