Medieval Catholic View of Laity Reading Bible
Religious exercise in medieval Europe (c. 476-1500) was dominated and informed by the Cosmic Church. The majority of the population was Christian, and "Christian" at this fourth dimension meant "Catholic" equally there was initially no other course of that religion. The rampant corruption of the medieval Church, yet, gave ascension to reformers such as John Wycliffe (50. 1330-1384) and January Hus (l. c. 1369-1415) and religious sects, condemned equally heresies by the Church building, such as the Bogomils and Cathars, among many others. Even so, the Church building maintained its power and exercised enormous influence over people'southward daily lives from the rex on his throne to the peasant in the field.
The Church regulated and defined an individual's life, literally, from birth to death and was thought to continue its agree over the person's soul in the afterlife. The Church was the manifestation of God'due south will and presence on globe, and its dictates were not to be questioned, even when information technology was apparent that many of the clergy were working far more than steadily toward their own interests than those of their god.
A dramatic accident to the ability of the Church building came in the course of the Black Decease pandemic of 1347-1352 during which people began to doubt the power of the clergy who could do nothing to end people from dying or the plague from spreading. Yet, the Church repeatedly crushed dissent, silenced reformers, and massacred heretical sects until the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648) which broke the Church building's power and allowed for greater liberty of thought and religious expression.
Church building Structure & Beliefs
The Church claimed authority from God through Jesus Christ who, according to the Bible, designated his apostle Peter every bit "the stone upon which my church volition be built" to whom he gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:18-19). Peter was therefore regarded as the first Pope, the caput of the church building, and all others as his successors endowed with the same divine say-so.
By the fourth dimension of the Middle Ages, the Church building had an established bureaucracy:
- Pope – the head of the Church
- Cardinals – advisors to the Pope; administrators of the Church
- Bishops/Archbishops – ecclesiastical superiors over a cathedral or region
- Priests – ecclesiastical authorities over a parish, village, or town church building
- Monastic Orders – religious adherents in monasteries supervised by an abbot/abbess
The Church maintained the belief that Jesus Christ was the just begotten son of the one truthful God equally revealed in the Hebrew scriptures and that those works (which would become the Christian Old Testament) prophesied Christ'south coming. The date of the world and history of humanity was all revealed through the scriptures which made upward the Christian Bible – considered the word of God and the oldest book in the earth – which was consulted equally a handbook on how to live co-ordinate to divine will and gain everlasting life in heaven upon 1's death.
Urban II at the Council of Clermont
Estimation of the Bible, however, was as well smashing a responsibility for the average person, and and so the clergy was a spiritual necessity. In club to talk to God or empathise the Bible correctly, 1 relied on i's priest as that priest was ordained past his superior who was, in turn, ordained by another, all nether the authorisation of the Pope, God's representative on earth.
The Church bureaucracy maintained the social hierarchy. One was born into a certain class, followed the profession of one's parents, and died as they had. Social mobility was extremely rare to nonexistent since the Church taught that it was God'south will one had been built-in into a certain set of circumstances and attempting to improve i's lot was tantamount to claiming God had made a fault. People, therefore, accustomed their lot and made the best of it.
Church in Daily Life
The lives of the people of the Middle Ages revolved around the Church. People, especially women, were known to attend church building three to five times daily for prayer and at least one time a calendar week for services, confession, and acts of contrition for repentance. The Church paid no taxes and was supported past the people of a town or city. Citizens were responsible for supporting the parish priest and Church overall through a tithe of ten percent of their income. Tithes paid for baptism ceremonies, confirmations, and funerals also as saint'due south day festivals and holy day festivals such every bit Easter celebrations.
The teachings of the Church were a certainty to the people of the Eye Ages. There was no room for doubt & questions were non tolerated.
The center of a congregation'south life in a minor-town church or city cathedral was non the altar but the baptismal font. This was a costless-standing stone receptacle/basin used for infant or adult baptism – frequently quite big and deep – which also served to determine a person's guilt or innocence when one was charged with a criminal offense. To articulate one's proper name, a person would submit to an ordeal in which ane was bound and dropped into the font. If the accused floated, information technology was a clear indication of guilt; if the accused sank, it meant innocence merely the accused would often drown.
Under the reign of the English king Athelstan (r. 924-939), the procedure for the ordeal was codified as constabulary:
If anyone pledges to undergo the ordeal, he is and then to come 3 days before to the mass-priest whose duty information technology is to consecrate it [the ordeal], and alive off bread and water and salt and vegetables until he shall go to it, and be present at mass on each of those three days, and brand his offering and become to communion on the day on which he shall go to the ordeal, and swear then the oath that he is guiltless of that charge co-ordinate to the common law, before he goes to the ordeal. (Brooke, 107)
There was also the ordeal of fe in which the accused was forced to concur or carry a hot poker. If the person could hold the red-hot fe without called-for and blistering their hands, they were innocent; there are no records of anyone being found innocent. The ordeal of water was also carried out by streams, rivers, and lakes. Women accused of witchcraft, for example, were oft tied in a sack with their true cat (thought to exist their demonic familiar) and thrown into a trunk of water. If they managed to escape and come to the surface, they were found guilty and then executed, but they most oftentimes drowned.
Ordeals, similar executions, were a form of public entertainment and, as with festivals, marriages, and other events in community life, were paid for by the people'southward tithe to the Church. The lower course, as usual, bore the burden of the Church's expenses merely the nobility was also required to donate large sums to the Church to ensure a place for themselves in heaven or to lessen their fourth dimension in purgatory.
The Church's teachings on purgatory – an afterlife realm between heaven and hell where souls remained trapped until they had paid for their sins – generated enormous wealth for various clergy who sold writs known equally indulgences, promising a shorter stay in purgatory for a price. Relics were another source of income, and it was common for unscrupulous clerics to sell fake splinters of Christ's cantankerous, a saint's finger or toe, a vial of h2o from the Holy Land, or any number of objects, which would allegedly bring luck or ward off misfortune.
Dante, Florence Cathedral
The teachings of the Church were a certainty to the people of the Center Ages. There was no room for incertitude, and questions were non tolerated. One was either in the Church or out of it, and if out, one'south interactions with the rest of the community were express. Jews, for example, lived in their own neighborhoods surrounded past Christians and were regularly treated quite poorly. The French king Charles Martel (r. 718-741), defeated the Muslim invasion of Europe at the Battle of Tours (also known as the Battle of Poitiers, 732), and then Muslims in Europe were rare at this time outside of Spain and the traveling merchants conducting trade. A citizen of Europe, therefore – who did non belong to either of these faiths – had to adhere to the orthodox vision of the Church in gild to collaborate with family unit, customs, and brand a living. If one found ane could not practise so (or at least appear to do so), the just pick was a so-called heretical sect.
Corruption & Heresy
The heretical sects of the Middle Ages were uniformly responses to the clear corruption and greed of the Church building. The immense wealth of the Church building, accrued through tithes and lavish gifts, only inspired a desire for fifty-fifty greater wealth which translated equally power. An archbishop could, and frequently did, threaten a noble, a town, or fifty-fifty a monastery with excommunication – past which one was exiled from the Church building and then from the grace of God and commerce with fellow citizens – for any reason. Even well-known and devout religious figures – such as Hildegard of Bingen (l. 1098-1179) – were bailiwick to 'discipline' forth these lines for disagreeing with an ecclesiastical superior.
Depiction of Hildegard of Bingen in the St. Foy Church
The priests were notoriously corrupt and, in many cases, illiterate parasites who just held their position due to family influence and favor. Scholar K. G. Coulton cites a letter of 1281 in which the author warns how "the ignorance of the priests precipitates the people into the ditch of fault" (259) and later cites the correspondence of 1 Bishop Guillaume le Marie de Angers, who writes:
The Priesthood includes innumerable contemptible persons of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals, from whose execrable lives and pernicious ignorance space scandals ascend, the Church sacraments are despised by the laity, and in very many districts the lay folk agree the priests as [vile]. (259)
The medieval mystic Margery Kempe (fifty. C. 1342-1438) challenged the wealthy clerics to reform their corruption while, almost 200 years before, Hildegard of Bingen had done the aforementioned as had men like John Wycliffe and January Hus. The Church was non interested in reform, however, because it had the last word on any subject equally God'south vocalisation on earth.
Those who constitute the abuses of the Church too intolerable and were seeking an honest spiritual experience instead of an unending pay-to-pray scheme, which not even decease could halt, joined religious sects outside the Church and attempted to alive peacefully in their ain communities. The best-known of these were the Cathars of Southern French republic who, while they interacted with the Catholic communities they lived near or in, had their own services, rituals, and belief system.
These kinds of communities were routinely condemned by the Church and destroyed, their members massacred, and whatever lands they had confiscated as Church property. Even an orthodox community which adhered to Catholic teachings – such as the Beguines – was condemned because it was begun spontaneously as a response to the needs of the people and was not initiated past the Church. The Beguines were laywomen who lived as nuns and served their community, holding all possessions in mutual and living a life of poverty and service to others, only they were not approved by the Church and were therefore condemned; they were disbanded forth with their male counterparts, the Beghards, in the 12th century.
Pope Innocent 3 & the Albigensian Crusade
These groups, and others like them, attempted to assert spiritual autonomy based on the scriptural authority of the Bible, without whatever of the Church'southward trappings or elaborate ritual. The Cathars believed that Christ never died on the cross and was therefore never resurrected but that, instead, the son of God had been spiritually offered for the sins of humanity on a college plane. The gospel stories, they claimed, should be understood every bit allegories using symbolic language rather than static histories of a by event. They farther advocated for the feminine principle in the divine, revering a goddess of wisdom known as Sophia, to whom they devoted their lives.
Living simply and serving the surrounding community, the Cathars amassed no wealth, their priests endemic nothing and were highly respected equally holy men even by Catholics, and Cathar communities offered worthwhile goods and services. The Beguines, while never claiming any behavior outside of orthodoxy, were equally devout and selfless in their efforts to help the poor and, especially, poor single mothers and their children. Both of these movements, however, offered people an culling to the Church, and the medieval Church building found that intolerable. Whatever change in people's attitudes toward organized religion threatened the power of the Church, and the Church had enough power to vanquish such movements fifty-fifty in cases where sects such as the Cathars had significant support and protection.
Reformation
John Wycliffe and his followers (known every bit Lollards) had been calling for reformation since the 14th century, and it might exist difficult for a modernistic-day reader to fully understand why no serious attempts were made at reform, but this is just because the modern era offers then many different legitimate avenues for religious expression. In the Middle Ages, it was inconceivable that there could exist any valid conventionalities system other than the Church.
Heaven, hell, and purgatory were all very real places to the people of the Middle Ages, and ane could not hazard offending God by criticizing his Church and damning one'south self to an eternity of torment in a lake of fire surrounded by demons. The wonder is not so much why more people did not telephone call for reform as that anyone was brave plenty to try.
The Protestant Reformation did not arise every bit an attempt to overthrow the power of the Church building merely began simply equally even so another effort at reforming ecclesiastical abuse and abuse. Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) was a highly-educated German priest and monk who moved from concern to outrage over the abuses of the Church. Martin Luther's 95 Theses (1517) famously criticized the sale of indulgences as a money-making scheme having no biblical authority and no spiritual worth and opposed the Church's teachings on a number of other matters.
Martin Luther
Luther was condemned by Pope Leo X in 1520 who demanded he renounce his criticism or confront excommunication. When Luther refused to recant, Pope Leo moved ahead with the excommunication in 1521, and Luther became an outlaw. Like Wycliffe, Hus, and others earlier him, Luther was simply stating the obvious in calling for an end to rampant abuse and abuse. Similar Wycliffe, he translated the Bible from Latin into the colloquial (Wycliffe from Latin to Middle English and Luther from Latin to German), opposed the concept of sacerdotalism whereby a priest is necessary as an intermediary between a laic and God, and maintained that the Bible and prayer were all 1 needed to commune directly with God. In making these claims, of course, he not only undermined the authority of the Pope simply rendered that position – as well equally those of the cardinals, bishops, archbishops, priests, and others – ineffectual and obsolete.
According to Luther, salvation was granted by the grace of God, not past the good deeds of homo beings, and so all of the works the Church required of people were of no eternal employ and only served to fill up the Church'south treasury and build their one thousand cathedrals. Owing to the political climate in Deutschland, and Luther's own charisma and intelligence, his effort at reform became the movement which would break the ability of the Church. Other reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli (fifty. 1484-1531) and John Calvin (l. 1509-1564) broke new basis in their own regions and many others followed conform.
Conclusion
The monopoly the Church held on religious belief and practise was broken, and a new era of greater spiritual freedom was begun, just it was not without cost. In their zeal to throw off the oppression of the medieval Church building, the newly liberated protestors destroyed monasteries, libraries, and cathedrals, the ruins of which however dot the European landscape in the present day.
The Church had certainly go increasingly corrupt and oppressive and its clergy was frequently characterized far more by a dearest of worldly goods and pleasures than spiritual pursuits but, at the same time, the Church building had initiated hospitals, colleges and universities, social systems for the intendance of the poor and the sick, and maintained religious orders which allowed women an outlet for their spirituality, imagination, and ambitions. These institutions became especially of import during the Black Death pandemic of 1347-1352 which killed millions of people in Europe and significantly impacted people's organized religion in the vision of the Church building.
The Protestant Reformation, unfortunately, destroyed much of the good the Church building had done in reacting to the corruption it had fallen into and its perceived failure to meet the claiming of the plague outbreak. Eventually, the unlike movements would organize into the Christian Protestant sects recognizable today – Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and so on – and set up their own institutes of higher learning, hospitals, and social programs. When the Reformation began, there was merely the Church, the monolithic powerhouse of the Heart Ages, which afterwards became only one option for religious expression among many.
This article has been reviewed for accurateness, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication.
Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Church/
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