One final thing needs to be mentioned regarding the day to day life and faith of the common man during the High Catholic Age. What I’m about to say can be related to virtually every age and every people, so this is not unique to one particular time period. Nevertheless, it has to be said about this time period in particular.
The “Middle Ages,” was not an “age of faith.” Contrary to what our modern narrative may say about that time, and despite all the incredible contributions the Church made to the culture at the time, it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an “age of faith.” It was not a time period in which the mass of people cowered under the threats of the Church, or clung to religious superstition and ignorance, in fear of the flames of hell. The fact is, for all the wonderful advances that devoted Christian men and women made in technology, philosophy, the arts and architecture during this time, Christianity made very little headway among the lower classes.
Rodney Stark puts it this way: “Medieval society was largely composed of non-participants [in the churches]” (Triumph of Christianity 256). Simply put, many churches were empty…and that seemingly wasn’t always a bad thing! Why? Because when peasants often did show up to church, they often disrupted the service with unruly behavior. And so, what you ended up having was the mass of European Christians staying in complete ignorance regarding the most basic Christian teachings. Even those who might go to church would still be largely ignorant of Christianity. Why? Because often times the clergy were illiterate and ignorant of Christianity as well! In fact, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, often times the clergy led just as immoral lives as the peasants!
Whores and Booze…some things never change…
So what did the life of the common man look like? Margrave of Brandenburg described the lives of peasants this way: “blaspheming, sorcery, adultery and whoring, excessive drinking and other vices all practiced openly [by] the common man.” And if you want to actually see this up close, look no further to Pieter Breughel’s painting The Wedding Dance (1566). In that painting we can see all the men dancing around and carousing…with full erections pushing through their tights. Furthermore, as Stark points out, in 1490 Rome, (ROME! Where the Pope lives!) “more than 15% of its resident adult females were registered prostitutes, and the Venetian ambassador described it as the ‘sewer of the world’” (TC 261). Erasmus actually accused some of convents of being nothing more than public brothels! And Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1436), a representative of the Pope, reported that one convent really was a brothel (TC 262).
Other Reasons Why the Peasantry Wasn’t All that Christian
Another reason why Christianity made so very little headway with the peasants was simple: there weren’t too many churches outside of major cities, where nobles could pay for them. And even where a few rural churches sprouted up, there often wasn’t a knowledgeable pastor to be in charge of it. Why weren’t there more actual Christians? There just weren’t enough knowledgeable teachers.
But even where there were concentrated efforts to teach the common folk, most attempts simply didn’t bare much fruit. Rodney Stark believes the reason for the failure was really quite simple: the teachers and clerics who did try to teach the lower classes couldn’t really connect with the common man. Not only could they make the Christian lifestyle appealing to ordinary people, they failed “…to present Christian doctrines in simple, direct language rather than as complex theology” (TC 264). Simply put, what plagued eras like the High Catholic Age is the same thing that plagues us today: too often, those who are educated and schooled in areas like Biblical Studies and Theology simply cannot communicate the basic truths of Christianity in a simple, easy to understand way for the majority of people who will never take graduate-level courses on the Christian faith.
What ends up happening is often one of three things: (A) Some Christian academics choose to stay within the ivory walls of academia, where they can write for their fellow academics in academic journals nobody really reads, and not be bothered by having to “dumb down” their learning for the masses; (B) Some Christian academics who attempt to teach the basic Christian faith at the laity level often fail miserably because they get caught up in their own minutiae, and fail to make the fundamental truths of the faith clear. It’s like they’re going in and trying to teach Calculus to a Pre-Algebra class—the information is just too beyond them; or (C) all too often, those Christian academics who actually are able to communicate effectively at a basic level get run out of town on a rail by reactionary fundamentalists who look at any kind of real education with suspicion.
The tragedy of all this is that people have seemed to forget that the thing that was most crucial to the spread of early Christianity was not academic formulas or air-tight theological arguments–and it certainly wasn’t making up pseudo-scientific, unbiblical claims that the universe is only 6,000 years and that T-Rexes and people were created within a single 24-hour time period on the sixth day of time itself.
The early Christians were convinced of one simple thing: that Jesus Christ had been crucified and yet was resurrected. That solitary historical fact changed absolutely everything in the world. It affected philosophy, art, music, theology, science…everything. But at the basic fundamental level it affected morals and ethics: Jesus Christ had established the Kingdom of God, and therefore those who united themselves to him in faith found themselves to be the re-created People of God, and that meant a revolution in understanding morality. As Stark points out, “In contrast, early Christianity was attractive to the laity because it offered a model of Christian virtue that improved their quality of life by urging attractive family norms, a tangible love of neighbor, and feasible levels of sacrifice, along with a clear message of salvation” (TC 264).
Salvation was tangible—it had hands and feet that ministered to “the least of these;” it had eyes and ears saw and heard the revealed truth in Christ in everything; and it had a mouth that proclaimed that God, through Christ was becoming king and was re-creating a world that had been made subject to death and corruption for far too long. And it had a back that allowed itself to be unjustly beaten, never repaying such evil back in kind. And yes, it also had a mind that revolutionized the arts, philosophy, and culture.
That being said, there are fundamental truths of the Christian faith that need to be learned—those truths help renew our minds, and that knowledge is vital to our Spiritual growth and gives further understanding to what it means to follow Christ. That’s why the failure to communicate the Christian faith effectively is so tragic. When Christian academics, clerics, or teachers fail to communicate the truths that have been revealed in Christ and when they fail to effectively translate those truths to the larger culture, the result is that the larger populace remains in a state of ignorance. As Stark said, “All across Europe, the established churches failed to convert and arouse the ‘masses,’ by failing to recognize that it was a job for preachers, not professors. But the clergy seemed unable to grasp the point that sophisticated sermons on the mysteries of the Trinity neither informed or converted” (TC 265).
Conclusion: A final quote from Rodney Stark
For the record, let me acknowledge that I quote Rodney Stark quite often. His book, The Triumph of Christianity is simply phenomenal. And so, within my little posts here on this blog, I want to share as much as I can of it. In any case, this last quote by Stark sums up the spiritual state of the Medieval world:
“Medieval times were not the ‘Age of Faith.’ For the vast majority of medieval Europeans, their ‘religious’ beliefs were a hodge-podge of pagan, Christian, and superstitious fragments; they seldom went to church; and they placed greater faith in the magic of the Wise Ones than in the services of the clergy. The frequent claims that empty churches and low levels of religious activity in Europe today reflect a steep decline in piety are wrong—it was always thus. As Martin Luther summed up in 1529, after recognizing the failure of his campaign to educate and arouse the general public: ‘Dear God help us…. The common man, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine; and indeed many pastors are in effect unfit and incompetent to teach. Yet they are all called Christians, are baptized, and enjoy the holy sacraments—even though they cannot recite either the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Commandments. They live just like animals’” (TC 272).
Here we are in 2017…some things never change.
Does anyone else see an echo of the Old Testament in this? Multiple times in the Old Testament, we see that a major problem in Israel is that the priests were failing completely to teach God’s Word to the people.
See 2 Chronicles 15:3.
See some other place earlier in Chronicles where a king sends out priests to make the rounds of Israelite towns and teach people the Law.
See the prescribed reading of the Law every so often at a feast that everyone was required to attend, and how that had so completely decayed by the reign of Joash that the scroll of the Torah was just gathering dust in a back room of the Temple.
See one of Pete Enns’s posts about how the Israelites had to be told over and over to worship Yahweh alone because syncretism and idolatry was just part of the local culture, and how most of them probably celebrated their festivals like many Americans celebrate Christmas, with little regard for the religious significance of the holidays.
And what especially strikes me are Leviticus 10, 1 Samuel 2, Hosea 4, and Malachi 1-2. In the last three of these cases, before and after the exile, the priests themselves did a horrible job of teaching people about the holiness of God and the right way to worship (in the first, they failed at the proper method themselves), and what did God do?
He removed them from their position as His priests.
Am I the only one whom that reminds of the Protestant Reformation?
Yes indeed…some things never change. We talked about this very thing in my Sunday School class last week. We like to think there were past “golden ages” (I.e. the Protestant Reformation; the reign of Josiah), but in reality, there has always been mostly ignorance and nominal faith at best.