The Church in Western Europe: The First Nineteen Centuries

One of the chief characteristics of the ancient world, according to Edwyn Bevan, was fear—fear of life, but even more of death. To bring deliverance from that bondage, Christ came in the fullness of time with the universal Gospel. His teaching cut right across vested interests. To the Roman Empire, with its pagan rites, its protecting gods, and its emperor cult, Christianity was both a crime and an enigma. It demanded absolute and exclusive obedience, disregarded ties of blood and race and class, regarded all conflicting loyalties as human devices to lure men away from divine ends, and looked for the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God in great glory.

Yet, incred`ibly, it prospered. Christians spread to every Roman province, and by A.D. 110 Ignatius referred to bishops settled in the ends of the known world. By the end of the second century we hear of martyrdoms in various parts of Europe (Gaul, Lyons, Vienne), and of churches in Germany and elsewhere. Speaking only of Europe, Harnack estimates that at the outbreak of the Diocletian persecution in 303 the Christian population accounted for a considerable minority in Rome and Lower Italy, Spain, Greece and Southern Gaul; for a small and scattered minority in Northern Italy; and for a negligible number in Northern Gaul, Germany and Belgium. Diocletian saw Christianity as a threat, and persecuted it. Constantine, wiser in his generation, embraced it as a potential prop for his empire. Such official sanction proved to be no unmixed blessing.

With paganism absorbed rather than destroyed, Christianity was no longer criminal, but fashionable. Apostolic simplicity and missionary persuasion were replaced by official grandeur and compulsion. Heresy became a capital offense.

Now that Christ and Caesar had come to terms, Constantine tried to impose a unity of creed and practice, and Christianity was made to some degree the justification for imperial tyranny and divine right. Orthodoxy came to be the chief mark of the Church; deviationism or individual searching after the truth was banned. Where the Empire had begun by officially permitting its subjects to be Christian, it later required them to be such.

The Empire acquired a dualistic character. Constantine’s continual interventions in ecclesiastical questions posed the perennial and still unsolved problem of the true relation between the Christian Church and the ostensibly Christian state. One unhappy outcome of this was that the best Christian minds, convinced that the Church existed not to reform the Empire but to save souls, washed their hands of public life, and many of them embraced the monastic way, leaving in the hands of career diplomats the government of an imperfectly converted Empire in which politics and religion were increasingly intermingled.

The Dark Ages

A new danger threatened when the Empire’s resistance to the barbarian hordes from the East finally crumbled. In the fifth century the Goths sacked the Eternal City; Visigoths established themselves in Southern Gaul and Spain; Franks in Northern Gaul and on the banks of the Rhine; Lombards in Northern Italy. Though Christianity had some effect on the invaders, the so-called Apostle of the Goths, Ulphilas, displayed Arian tendencies, and these were conveyed by his followers to Italy, Spain and Africa. A particularly diluted form of Christianity filtered through to the Franks.

During this time North Africa was lost to the Christian cause (and has never been won back), and Spain became for centuries an Islamic stronghold—and heir, it may be added, to the unique learning and science of the Arab world from which Western Europe has immeasurably benefited. Despite setbacks, orthodox Christians throughout the Dark Ages strove for the conversion of the heathen peoples, for a high standard of personal holiness (generally in terms of monasticism), and for freedom from secular interference in ecclesiastical matters.

Movements And Reforms

In the eleventh century a significant trend was seen in the attempt by Gregory VII (Hildebrand) to divert power from the Emperor to the Pope—in which policy he was partially successful, but only partially, for later in the century Urban VI saw the necessity for recouping the flagging fortunes of the Papacy. On the principle that nothing unites men so much as a common antagonism, he launched the Crusades. “The Welshman left his hunting; the Scot his fellowship with lice; the Dane his drinking party; the Norwegian his raw fish.” The idea of the Holy War caught the European imagination, and whole cities migrated, “hungering and thirsting only after Jerusalem.” It was a magnificent failure which both enhanced and corrupted the Papacy. It began with the Christian invasion of the Holy Land; it ended with the Ottoman Turk empire established along the shores of the Danube.

The Papacy survived a period of internal dissension and emerged triumphant over conciliar attempts to limit its power, only to encounter its greatest ordeal of all time. The Reformation was nothing less than a revolution—from works to faith, from tradition to scripture, from a whole system of intermediaries and sacerdotalism to the universal priesthood of believers. It was, in fact, a rediscovery of the true nature of the Gospel which split both Germany and Switzerland in two, completely captured England, Scotland and the Scandinavian countries, and created sizeable minorities in countries once considered immovably Catholic. In other lands, however, it made little or no impression, and merely served to effect a closing of the Catholic ranks, notably in Spain where Protestants now constitute only a tiny minority.

Post Reformation Europe

Reaction set in, so that by the eighteenth century in Luther’s Germany the deficiencies of Pietism, which deprecated reason and even common sense, contributed to a rationalism which in deistic trappings came from England.

The latter imported also to France a brand of rationalism which led to the French Revolution. The interests of monarchy and Church were identified, and Diderot fairly reflected the current philosophy when he said that the world’s salvation would come only when the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

In Italy, home of the Vatican, we see during this period an increasing secularism unparalleled in any other country in Western Europe, and soon to make it a fruitful breeding-ground for a godless philosophy which during the latter nineteenth century was being planned by Marx and Engels in Christian England.

Yet, paradoxically, the Vatican which for centuries had looked beyond the Italian States and across the Alps to Germany for support (a fact fraught with historical significance) not only maintained but consolidated its power. Pius IX (d. 1878) offset the loss of some temporal possessions by assuming autocratic powers, particularly in the dogma of Papal infallibility, which would have impressed even Hildebrand or Boniface VIII, and which resulted in the Old Catholic schism and the Kulturkampf in Germany.

The nineteenth century closed with Protestants and Roman Catholics moving further away from each other, despite the efforts of Pius’ enlightened successor, Leo XIII, and with church-state relations in precarious plight in Italy and France.

In nineteen centuries Christianity had come a long way. In the process the message had become blurred in parts—but the vested interests which opposed it were oddly unchanged.

In this issue CHRISTIANITY TODAY deals particularly with the Christian Church in countries of Western Europe, but there is universal significance in their problems and needs, their temptations and triumphs. Many of these on close examination are found to center around that relationship between church and state which Leopold von Ranke called the content of history. The period covered in the following articles is roughly the last 50 years, a period which has seen two world wars and unparalleled changes on the map of Europe.

Benito Mussolini called this the century of the State; Otto Dibelius calls it the century of the Church. It is an age in which newly-discovered wonders bear eloquent testimony to the Infinite Workman who fashioned it all “in the beginning,” yet one in which men’s imaginations have been fixed on godless ideologies. It is an age in which people need security so desperately that they have committed their destinies to strong-arm men; yet an age in which a famous Swiss theologian repudiates “that false certainty of faith which knows God’s Will in every condition of life as accurately as if man, Bible in hand, had sat with Him in the heavenly councils.” It is an age in which many people no longer ask “Is Christianity true?,” but rather “What is Christianity?” During this half-century the worldly wisdom which whispers compromise with a materially successful state has often prevailed in a church which should have known its history better: between Tertullian’s resolve to have no truck with “black error” and the futile concordats of Pius XI is a gulf immeasurably greater than eighteen centuries.

Oswald Spengler forty years ago in The Decline of the West predicted the triumph of the secular state. The wheel would then have gone full circle back to the Roman Empire, days when men were mortally afraid of the unknown, before Christ came. Who knows but that the universal fear abroad in the world today is the harbinger of his return.

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