Part III — Medieval Christianity
Chapter I — Expansion and Organization
§ 1 Position in the Seventh Century
When the swift triumph of Islam had cut off from Christendom the populations among whom its creed had been evolved, that creed ruled in the Byzantine State; in Italy, still half-imperial, half-Lombardic; in Spain, then under Teutonic masters; in Frankish Gaul; in parts of southern Germany; in Saxon Britain, of which the conversion was begun by the lesser Augustine under Gregory the Great, after the overthrow of the earlier Church by the heathen invaders; and in Ireland, which had been largely Christianized in the fourth and fifth centuries, apparently by Greek or eastern means. In the Moslem world, Christianity existed on sufferance, and chiefly in heretical forms, being Nestorian in Persia and Monophysite in Egypt, as also in Abyssinia; but Christian Europe was now nominally agreed on the main official dogmas.
In the more civilized European States, specific paganism still throve more or less obscurely, both by way of educated antiquarianism and of peasant persistence in old ways; and the Church framed canons against the latter and treatises against the former. The mass of the population, however, was satisfied with the ample elements of the old system embodied in the new. In the more barbaric States, Christianity was even less of a modifying force than in the others. Like the people of the empire, the barbarians carried on their pagan rites, festivals, and superstitions under the name of Christianity; and whereas the educated world was in a measure forced by its pessimists and its pietists to recognize the difference between its documents and its practice, the more primitive races simply translated Christian tradition and theory into the terms of their own life. Save for an exaltation of celibacy, and a confessional inquisition, at once prurient and puerile, into the details of the sexual relation, it in no way changed the plane of their thought and conduct. What it did alter was their political life, inasmuch as the co-ordination of the priesthood made everywhere for the power of the prince, if he had the wit to use it, the Church being everywhere shaped as far as might be on the model and the ideal set up by Constantine.
Wherever the Roman empire had been, unless anti-Christian violence has intervened, the Church system to this day bears witness to the union of Church and State. In France, for instance, there is still a bishop, as a rule, wherever there was a Roman municipality, and an archbishop wherever there was a provincial capital; and where in imperial territory there were variations in the administration of rural districts—some being under their own magistrates, some under those of neighbouring towns—the Church system varied similarly. In the East, rural bishops, or chorepiscopi, were common; but in the West they seem to have prevailed only in the Dark Ages, the general tendency being to give the rank of mere priests to the holders of country benefices, and to make bishops the rulers of dioceses from an urban seat or “cathedral” church. Country parishes, on the other hand, were formed into groups, presided over by an archipresbyter, without episcopal rank. The spirit of imperial rule pervaded all Church life. Where large landowners under the Christian emperors had sought to resist the centralizing system by appointing the priests on their own estates, they were compelled to obtain the approval of the nearest bishop; and when they sought next to do without priests, a law was passed forbidding laymen to meet for worship without an ecclesiastic. This principle was carried wherever the Church went, and rigid subordination was the general result. To secure stability, however, the Church had to rest on a recognized economic interest throughout the priesthood; and the early practice of a communal life for the bishop and his clergy, which was still common in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, was gradually broken up. The competition of monasticism first forced upon all a stricter rule; and priests living in their bishop’s house became known as canonici regulares, “canons regular,” or under rule—a duplication of terms, since “canon” originally meant “rule,” and “canonical” was simply “regular.” But the obvious financial advantages, as well as the liberties of the unattached priests, soon made their status the aim of all not devoted to the monastic ideals. The change was furthered by the habit of leaving endowments to individual churches and to individual offices; till at length, even in the cathedral towns, the canons lived apart, each with his own revenue, though often dining at a common table; while the country priests necessarily became still more their own masters in the matter of income. Thus arose the “secular clergy,” the title of “regular” being restricted to those who lived under a monastic rule—as that of Benedict or that of Augustine; and these in turn came to be classed with monks as distinguished from the others. In addition, there sprang up in the Middle Ages a number of unattached or itinerant priests, as well as private chaplains.
In every order alike, however, an economic interest was sooner or later the ruling motive. Beneficed priests wrought for the church under which they had their income, keeping as much of it as they could, but recognizing the need for official union; and the monastic orders in their turn grew wealthy by endowments, and zealous in proportion for the temporal power of the Church. As always, the self-denying and devoted were a minority; but the worldly and the unworldly alike wrought everywhere in the political interests of the kings, who had established and endowed the Church to begin with, and who in return were long allowed many liberties in the appointment and control of bishops and priests. A common result was the appointment of lay favourites or benefactors of the king; and bishoprics seem almost as often as not to have been in some degree purchasable. The Church, in short, was a social and political function of each State, with the papal system loosely and variably co-ordinating the whole.