I really enjoyed John Dickson's Bullies And Saints: An Honest Look At The Good And Evil Of Christian History. There is much to learn from the record of bullies and saints in church history lest we repeat their failures or fail to replicate their successes.
I am doing a series of posts where I cut and paste from his book. Where I fill in words, you will see [brackets]. I use ellipses for all the places where I know there is a gap, but (because of how Kindle highlighting works) I am sure there are many places where I fail to note what's written between two sentences I put next to each other. If what I post feels disconnected or clunky as you read it, that's my editing, not his writing :)
The first installment was the most positive. The church's reputation prior to Constantine was pretty solid. But following Constantine's influence, leaders like Ambrose and then Augustine changed the tune the church had been singing. The changes may not strike you as jarring yet, but they are laying a foundation infused with a love of money and power on which others will build terrible things. The second installment covered the time from Julian to Augustine's City of God, a time with remarkably different - sometimes jarringly different - visions for how Christians should live in society. This leads us to part three.Much of the old work of the church was still going on. And there were plenty of genuine prophets popping up and accusing the church of being a pack of hypocrites. The third installment ended this way: "If, by the 500s, being Christian was indistinguishable from being Roman, by the 1000s being Christian was indistinguishable from being Frankish or Saxon. Europe and the church found themselves converted to each other’s ways."
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It remains a thing of wonder—if that’s the right word—that a thousand years after Jesus Christ, violence was viewed as an acceptable part of Christian devotion. But it would be wrong to imagine that this was the main business of the church in the medieval period. The main business was the normal business we observed about earlier times: evangelization followed up with the establishment of churches, monasteries, hospitals, charities, and schools.Many of Jerome of Bethlehem’s (AD 342–420) writings seek to expose the laziness and materialism that had crept into the church in the late fourth century, as more and more wealthy elites walked out of the wings of the church into its centre. One of his letters—more like an essay—castigates “presbyters” (that is, priests) who use the church to pursue money and women… Jerome himself set a very different standard, and he had a genuine impact on people’s idea of how a true presbyter was meant to behave—gentle, scholarly, pastoral, unworldly, and pure.
Perhaps the most influential religious figure of the early Middle Ages was the Italian monk Benedict of Nursia (AD 480–550). He founded a few monasteries in short order and gained wide fame. A few church authorities were wary of his call to a simpler version of Christianity, and they publicly opposed him…. Many were converted by his preaching. Large numbers joined his movement. Before his death in the middle of the sixth century, he had founded twelve monastic communities.
Benedict’s guidelines for the life of a monk are known as the Rule of Saint Benedict… Benedict’s “rule” explicitly forbade the accumulation of possessions—an attempt to prevent greed in the church. It demanded five hours a day of productive laboor, whether farming, building, or craftsmanship. It set a minimum of two hours private reading each day (oh, bliss!), several periods of daily prayer, and the regular performance of charitable works.
The Rule of Benedict continued to call people back to the “instruments of good works” for centuries. Thousands of monasteries (for men and for women) were established throughout France and Germany over the next five hundred years. Many of them were modeled, at least loosely, on Benedict’s vision of a community marked by prayer, study, productivity, and a life of charity.
By AD 909, some leaders were in deep despair at the state of the church. They called a council at Rheims, northeast of Paris, where bishops recorded their lament for posterity:
“every man does what pleases him, despising the laws of God and man and the ordinances of the church. The powerful oppress the weak, the land is full of violence against the poor.”
In…Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac, Odo of Cluny provided a model of a soldier who only ever fought to defend the weak, who refused to shed blood, and who pursued humility toward everyone…. In Odo’s other great work, Collationes or Conferences, he castigates proud and wealthy Christians:
“How then are these robbers Christians, or what do they deserve who slay their brothers for whom they are commanded to lay down their lives? You have only to study the books of antiquity to see that the most powerful are always the worst. Worldly nobility is due not to nature but to pride and ambition. If we judged by realities, we should give honor not to the rich for the fine clothes they wear but to the poor who are the makers of such things.”
“Whenever I went out with him,” John of Salerno writes, “he was always careful to ask if we had something for the poor.” And when he met the poor, “he gave to all who asked of him.” Sometimes, when Odo suspected someone was poor but unwilling to ask for anything, he would try to preserve their dignity by asking them if they would sing a song for him. When they did, he paid them handsomely for the performance.
“They deserved, he would say, no small remuneration.” He did the same with poor farmers selling their meagre fruits on the streets. He demanded they increase their price for him, and only when they agreed to some absurd amount would he make the purchase:“And so Odo enriched these men under the pretence of paying the price.”
Odo sometimes found cheeky ways to drive his points home to his attendants and students... The blind and the lame, Odo said, would be the doorkeepers of heaven. Therefore no one ought to drive them away from his house, so that in the future they should not shut the doors of heaven against him. So if one of our servants, not being able to put up with their shameless begging, replied sharply to them or denied them access to the door of our tent, Odo at once rebuked him with threats. Then in the servant’s presence he used to call the poor man and command him, saying, “When this man comes to the gate of heaven, pay him back in the same way.” He said this to frighten the servants, so that they should not act in this way again, and that he might teach them to love charity.
One reformer was Hildegard of Bingen (AD 1098–1179). Hildegard lived as a Benedictine Abbess, the ruler of a community of devout women living by the Rule of Benedict. From a young age she was recognized as a “prophetess,” a term that meant something more like inspired preacher than a person who predicts the future... Her work was aimed at the reform of her community and the church, and her reforming agenda parallels that of various schoolmen of her time.
She was not only the leader of her own community of women, “she conducted preaching tours, wrote songs,” Dickens notes, “and fought for the rights of her monastery’s independence from the protecting male monastery.”
From a young age, Catherine of Siena (AD 1347–1380) felt she had been called by God to increase devotion to God in the church... In Catherine’s case, people were drawn to her personal sanctity and spiritual wisdom. Her correspondents included friends, abbesses, prostitutes, popes, queens, and various local authorities… Catherine’s central concern was that people should live in response to Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf.
Francis of Assisi (AD 1181–1226) is one of the most remarkable figures of the Middle Ages… Francis was not a pacifist in the strict sense. He would have accepted Augustine’s principle of “just war”: state violence is tragically necessary to defend the weak from an aggressor… He hoped to overcome the threat of Islam “through reasoned evangelism . . . by conversion, not conquest…” Francis preached to the Crusaders in Egypt. He declared that it was God’s will to convert the Muslims, as an alternative to war. He was mocked by the Christian soldiers. “To the rough Crusader troops, he became something of a joke,” notes Augustine Thompson; “to their leaders, he seemed a feckless threat to morale.”
The medieval church throughout Europe continued its traditional work of establishing charities and building hospitals… For the entire medieval period, the obligation to assist the poor fell to the church, specifically to bishops as regional church leaders, priests as leaders of individual parishes, and deacons, who often did the face-to-face work with the impoverished.
The standard work on canon law as it relates to charity is Medieval Poor Law by the celebrated historian Brian Tierney of Cornell University. His detailed account of the evidence leaves me (Tierney doesn’t say this) feeling that much church law in this period would be described today as “leftist.” In fact, I posted some of this material on social media recently, and someone asked if I was outing myself as a socialist or even a communist!
Medieval church lawyers insisted that the poor had genuine “rights”—and they called them rights —not only to the resources of the church but also to the resources of wealthy citizens. Against much ancient (and some modern) opinion, the starting point of their thought was that “poverty was not a kind of crime.” Nor was it a sign of moral defect, whether laziness or foolishness. It was a tragedy.
Church lawyers knew that people did sometimes game the system, preferring charity to hard work. In these cases, it was right to “deny alms to such individuals when they were known.” Yet, the system itself should not be premised on a cynical approach to the poor. As Joannes Teutonicus put it succinctly in the 1200s, “In case of doubt it is better to do too much than to do nothing at all.” As Tierney notes, it is almost as if the medieval canonists were trying to head off the later Enlightenment laws, such as the English Poor Act of 1834, which “assumed that if a man was destitute he was probably an idle lout who deserved punishment.”
By contrast, the Decretum and the Glossa Ordinaria are peppered with lines such as: “Feed the poor. If you do not feed them, you kill them”; “Our superfluities belong to the poor”; “Whatever you have beyond what suffices for your needs belongs to others”; “A man who keeps for himself more than he needs is guilty of theft.”
These canonists went so far as to teach that “a man in extreme need who took the property of another was not guilty of any crime. He was not stealing what belonged to another but only taking what properly belonged to himself.” And Joannes Teutonicus argued that a poor person who was neglected by a rich neighbor could appeal to church courts. Those courts could compel the wealthy offender to be more generous by threat of church sanction or even excommunication. And to make it easier for the poor to go to court, the church waived court fees for those without means.
Pope Honorius III (AD 1216–1227) laid down that “litigants too poor to provide themselves with legal counsel were to be supplied with free counsel by the court,” something that happily still exists in secular courts today... An Act of Edward VI in 1552 “for the provision and relief of the poor” contained legislation allowing the poor to denounce a miser to the local bishop. The bishop was then to “induce and persuade him or them by charitable ways and means,” whatever that included. An Act of Elizabeth I of 1563 laid down that “if the bishop’s exhortations were unsuccessful, a compulsory contribution could be assessed and collected under pain of imprisonment.”
Fiscal conservatives today who see such taxes as “theft” have the church to blame. Medieval bishops and church lawyers, of course, would have replied that the true thief is any wealthy person who does not give some of their surplus to the poor.
This is the century, the sixteenth century, when the English state absorbed the church. And so “the system of dual coequal authorities which was characteristic of the Middle Ages came to an end.” In taking over the church, says Tierney, “the state necessarilybecame responsible for the system of public poor relief which until then had been regulated by canon law.”
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