Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo, colossal marble relief by Alessandro Algardi, 1646–53; in St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City.Alinari—Anderson/Art Resource, New York
Pope Gregory I (reigned 590–604), more than any pope before or after him, laid the foundations for the Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages. He sent Augustine of Canterbury (died 604/605) to bring about the conversion of England to the Christian faith, and he corresponded with the rulers of the Merovingian Franks and with the bishops of Gothic Spain. He built up papal administration in central Italy and negotiated with the Lombard rulers who occupied the peninsula. Rejecting the universalist claims of the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory asserted papal primacy over moral issues and emphasized the humility of his office by styling himself the “servant of the servants of God.” His commitment to a life of service is demonstrated in his Pastoral Rule, a guidebook for bishops that outlines their obligations to teach and to serve as moral exemplars to their flocks. Gregory the Great was also one of the most important patrons of the Benedictine monastic movement, to which he owed a considerable part of his spiritual upbringing; he wrote a life of St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547).
Notwithstanding the contributions of these popes, medieval Roman Catholicism would not have taken the form it did without the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312. Constantine legalized Christianity, promoted its interests, and took an active role in its institutional and doctrinal development. Even though some supported a heretical version of Christianity, all subsequent emperors except Julian the Apostate favoured the faith. Theodosius I (347–395), however, made Catholic Christianity the official religion of the empire in 381 and prohibited the worship of pagan gods in 392. After Constantine every branch of Christendom had to work with rulers who claimed to profess its faith, and the manner in which the two main branches of the church (in Rome and Constantinople; before the Reformation) dealt with the state had a considerable impact on their development. As the church approached the conclusion of the first millennium of its history, it had become the legatee of the spiritual, administrative, and intellectual resources of the early centuries.
Most of the preceding analysis pertains to the whole of Christendom. The Eastern Orthodox Church has almost as large a share in the developments of the early centuries of Christianity as does the Roman Catholic Church, and even Protestantism looks to these centuries for its authentication. However, the Middle Ages may be defined as the era in which the distinctively Roman Catholic forms and institutions of the church were established. The following chronological account of medieval developments shows how these forms and institutions emerged from the context of the shared history of the early Christian centuries. Michael Frassetto Jaroslav Jan Pelikan The church of the early Middle Ages
During the thousand years of the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, the papacy matured and established itself as the preeminent authority over the church. Religious life assumed new forms or reformed established ones, and missionaries expanded the geographic boundaries of the faith. The most dramatic example of this missionary activity was the effort to retake the Holy Land by force during the Crusades, but less-violent missions were undertaken in pagan Europe and in the Islamic world. Evangelical missions were most frequently led by monks, who also preserved the traditions of Classical and Christian learning throughout the so-called Dark Ages. After the year 1000, cathedral schools replaced monasteries as cultural centres, and new forms of learning emerged. The cathedral schools were in turn supplanted by the universities, which promoted a “Catholic” learning that was inspired, oddly enough, by the transmission of the work of Aristotle through Arab scholars. Scholasticism, the highly formalized philosophical and theological systems developed by the medieval masters, dominated Roman Catholic thought into the 20th century and contributed to the formation of the European intellectual tradition. With the rise of the universities, the threefold structure of the ruling classes of Christendom was established: imperium (political authority), sacerdotium (ecclesiastical authority), and studium (intellectual authority). The principle that each of these classes was independent of the other two within its sphere of authority had enduring consequences in Europe. The concept of Christendom
By the 10th century the religious and cultural community known as Christendom had come into being and was poised to enter a prolonged period of growth and expansion. Important progress had taken place well before this period, however. Beginning in the last years of the Roman Empire, the central institutions of medieval Catholic Christianity had gradually evolved, laying the foundation for the great advances of the later Middle Ages and beyond.
One of the most significant developments of the late ancient and early medieval periods—for Roman Catholicism and all forms of Christianity—was the emergence of Christian theology. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Christian apologists attempted to explain their faith to their pagan contemporaries in the philosophical vocabulary of the age; among the most outstanding of such scholars was Origen (c. 185–c. 254), who developed a thoroughgoing Christian Neoplatonism. It was not until the 4th and 5th centuries, however, that the basic Christian doctrines were established. The Council of Nicaea and subsequent councils formulated the doctrines concerning the nature of the Godhead and the person of Christ. Subsequently, a number of Christian thinkers—the Latin Church Fathers—provided commentary on a wide range of issues, including the meaning of the sacraments, the Trinity, soteriology, eschatology, and ecclesiology. The most prominent and influential of these early theologians was St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). His teachings on the sacraments, salvation, and the Trinity remained the starting point of discussion for Christian thinkers throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and his monumental City of God (413–426/427) provided a Christian philosophy of history and a new way to understand human society and its relationship to God. Augustine’s works were a model of learned and elegant Latin style, as were the sermons of St. Ambrose (339–397), whose reputation for sanctity and celibacy—as well as his excommunication of Theodosius in 390—set important precedents. Another Church Father, St. Jerome (c. 347–419/420), produced a Latin translation of the Bible—the Vulgate—that would serve as the standard text for centuries to come. Later ecclesiastics, including Caesarius of Arles (c. 470–542) and Isidore of Sevilla (c. 560–636), produced a formidable body of Christian commentary and other scholarship that built upon the foundation of the Latin Church Fathers.