The Old Church, Part 2

The Reformation: A History
by Diarmaid MacCulloch

(Page 5 of 5)

The greatest theologian of the western Church was a Roman intellectual born in the fourth century c.e., Augustine of Hippo. We will be meeting him very often, for his thoughts decided much in the future thinking of Latin-speaking Christianity (see especially chapter 3, pages 103-11). Augustine puzzled about what Christians ought to think about Jews. Against Christian extremists, some of whom wanted to reject all the Hebrew Scripture, he strongly reaffirmed that God had chosen the Jews to be a special people; against Jews themselves, he thundered that they were blind in rejecting Christ as their Messiah. Augustine's generation of Christians was one of the first to enjoy the luxury of backing up its opinions with Roman military force. Should this force be directed against obstinate and offensive Jews in the same way as Augustine recommended that Christian rulers ought to put down obstinate and offensive Christian heretics? Augustine thought not. He decided that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. Therefore they ought to be allowed to continue their community life, although without the full privileges of citizenship that Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end.

Accordingly, the Christian Church allowed Jewish communities to survive, while over centuries it destroyed all other religious competitors. Jews kept their own places of worship (synagogues) and they generally spoke the language of the people around them, particularly whatever language was spoken by the wealthy and powerful, reserving their ancestral Hebrew solely for worship and reading their sacred books. Although they thus sought to avoid standing out from the wider population, they were generally excluded from positions of power, which forced them to turn toward other ways of making a living, especially lending money. Most Christians understood the Old Testament to forbid taking interest on money, and so generally kept away from this activity; Jews had a rather clearer grasp of the nuanced discussion of this subject in their sacred Scripture, and they stepped into the gap.3 This specialization in moneylending and credit made Jews useful to Christian rulers, yet constantly vulnerable to debtors turning on them. The consequences could be very serious for them if the ruler himself was a bad debtor, or saw a way of courting cheap popularity from his subjects. Hence the Jews' expulsion by Edward I of England, which was followed by similar action from the king of France in 1394.

Other rulers, including the pope, were more steadfast observers of Augustine's rules in protecting the Jewish community, but there were constant outbursts of anti-Jewish feeling among Christians, often encouraged by local Church authorities. The most serious consequence resulted from the growth in the twelfth century of an anti-Jewish "blood libel," a legend that from time to time groups of Jews kidnapped Christian children (usually male) and sadistically murdered them for use in their rituals; characteristically crucifixion was involved. Probably these stories reflected real incidents in which someone had indeed abused and murdered a child. When a local community could not face the horror of what had happened, they deflected the guilt onto the alien community in their midst. Sometimes the Church patently tried to profit from such incidents: The Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral in England, encouraged by their bishop, were pioneers in the blood-libel business when in the 1140s they tried to foster in their own church a cult of an alleged young victim of the Jews called William. Unfortunately for the monks, the good folk of Norwich loathed their cathedral more than they did the Jews, and the pilgrimage to little St. William never amounted to much. Other cults were more successful (chapter 2, pages 56-57), and the blood libel has remained a recurring motif in the worst atrocities against the Jews.

Other Christian developments added to Jewish troubles. Francis of Assisi, that generous-hearted and anarchic preacher of God's love, started a great renewal movement in the thirteenth-century Church; in part it was institutionalized as the Franciscan Order of friars, who did much to revive preaching in the western Church (pages 30-31). Franciscan preachers urged the crowds who came to hear them to meditate devotionally on the earthly life of Christ (page 20). That had the logical consequence of making the faithful also think about the death of Christ on the Cross, and often this led directly to deep hatred of Jews. Franciscans thus ironically became major exponents of anti-Semitism in medieval western Europe and were deeply involved in some of the worst violence against Jewish communities; their fellow friars and rivals, the Dominicans, were not far behind.5 Not surprisingly, Jews tended to live together for safety, a trend developed early in Italy and that Christian rulers increasingly turned into an obligation. The word "ghetto," to describe such enclosed areas is of Italian origin, although there is more than one explanation for what it might originally have meant. Jewish physical isolation made matters worse and bred new legends among a suspicious population: that the Jews were ready to poison Christian wells, for instance; or steal consecrated Eucharistic wafers to do them terrible indignities; or collaborate with the Muslim powers that threatened the borders of Christendom.

Already the meeting of art, drama, human fears, and hopes in the unpretentious village churches of Preston Bissett and Wenhaston has sent us many hundreds of miles across Europe. That may help us understand the power and European-wide scope of the organization that tore itself apart in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Nicholas Ridley, one of the talented scholarly clergy who rebelled in England against the old Church, wrote about this to one of his fellow rebels, John Bradford, in 1554, while they both lay in prisons waiting for the old Church to burn them for heresy. As Bishop Ridley reflected on the strength of their deadly enemy, which now he saw as the power of the Devil himself, he said that Satan's old world of false religion stood on two "most massy posts and mighty pillars...These two, sir, are they in my judgement: the one his false doctrine and idolatrical use of the Lord's supper; and the other, the wicked and abominable usurpation of the primacy of the see of Rome." So just as Preston Bissett's chancel arch was supported by its two grotesque stone figures, the whole system of the medieval western Church was built on the Mass and on the central role of the pope.6 Without the Mass, indeed, the pope in Rome and the clergy of the western Church would have had no power for the Protestant reformers to challenge, for the Mass was the centerpiece around which all the complex devotional life of the Church revolved. We must examine its significance at length, and in particular the doctrine of purgatory; for Ridley, this would have been at the heart of the "false doctrine" that distorted the Mass from its origins in the eucharistic meal.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, and professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Suffolk and the Tudors, winner of the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize, and Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize.