Book Review: Christendom

Review and Summary of Interesting Arguments

(Cover image of The Coronation of Charlemagne).¹

I recently finished reading Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300 by Peter Heather. This is the second Heather book I’ve read; his other work, The Fall of the Roman Empire, was one of my favorite popular histories concerning the collapse paradigm, neck and neck with Goldsworthy’s study². Christendom is a sweeping study of Latin Christianity (alongside relations with eastern Christianity, particularly the Orthodox/Byzantine Church), from its emergence under Constantine to the establishment of a “one-party” ecclesiastical state unifying much of Europe under the piety of the fourth Lateran council. It is a sweeping history covering a millennia of complex doctrinal debates, material developments, political and social events, and administrative emergence. What Heather attempts to do, and I believe achieved, is explain how a first-century radical ascetic “Jesus Movement” in Roman Palestine transformed into a Latin-based one-party theocratic state that superseded the powers of the secular European dynasties within a millennia.

To answer this Heather divides the study into three, roughly equal, phases: the first concerning the “Romanization of Christianity”, how Cosntantine’s adoption of Christianity, ten years after the end of state-sponsored persecution of Christians under the Diocletian/Tetrarchic edicts, in turn resulted in the fifth century “Confessional State”; the second phase concerning the collapse of the Roman Confessional state, Christianity under the various Western successors, Byzantine Christianity and the emergence of Islam; and the final phase concerns itself with the reemergence of a Christian confessional state under the Carolingian Empire, its evolution in Western Europe under the Ottonians and Salians and the consolidation of Papal power by the end of the 13th century.

Heather’s writing is both lucid and entertaining, a conclusion reinforced after reading two of his works. His chapters usually follow a similar pattern: present a case study that exhibits a new phenomenology of Christianity, divergent from the behavior discussed in previous chapters. He then provides a historical material and social context, invokes further examples of the phenomena, and then reconciles it with his overall evolutionary thesis. I find his method of historical inquiry an appealing blend of biographical and literary study of key figures in the epochs, balanced by empirical contextualization. The chapters flew by while reinforcing his overall arguments. By the end of the book I am left convinced, though open to alternative arguments, of the “Heatherite” theory of Latin Christian evolution.

Below I will attempt to summarize some of my study notes from the text. This is not comprehensive; some of the particular details regarding theological and liturgical content I found a bit tiring. Though some of the historical insights regarding the doctrinal debates concerning hierarchy, simony, and sacramental piety were new to me as a novice in the history of the Church, I found them very welcoming to a beginner. The most notable topics in my view were the phenomena of “self-Christianization,” a procedure of elite conversion to Christianity, prompted by various external influences that aided in establishing the Roman confessional states and the Baltic and Eastern European ninth and tenth-century polities; the fusion of pagan cultural practices and Christian doctrine, particularly among the Latin Grammarians of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon conversions.

Roman Christendom

The first phase of the book concerns itself with the early development of Roman Christianity, starting with a discussion concerning the conversion of Constantine and ending with the collapse of Western Roman rule.

Self-Christianization

Heather draws a comparison to the effect of Romanization during the pre-Constantine period. The spread of Latin culture often began as a bottom-up approach. Material benefits were reaped by local elites who aligned closer with the imperial system. The Republican and early Imperial expansion of Rome resulted in an intake of various pockets of local elite power. Contrary to a modern perception of the effusive, top-down, autocratic states, the adoption of Latin culture was a bottom-up process. The effect was not deterministic, but external pressures generated a phenomenon whereby “individual member(s) of a newly conquered provincial elite could decide whether or not to participate in the process - but all faced a powerful cocktail of incentive and constraint which made it overwhelmingly likely that the majority would do so.”³ The top-down mechanism was not present in this transformation, mostly due to the geometry of Roman state power: prior to the Diocletian reforms, power was generally localized to a Latin provincial governor, who collaborated with the local elite to facilitate governance.

In brief summary, the Crisis of the Third Century—an anarchic period that saw the increase in “Barracks Emperors,” various civil wars, and disastrous defeats under the emergence of Sassanian dynamism—ended with the emergence of Diocletian and the Tetrarchy in the final two decades of the third century. Political power in Rome transformed: a massive bureaucratization of the Empire occurred, with the diffused power centers transferring more and more to a sycophantic cloud surrounding the emperor. This new bureaucracy emerged in part due to the massive tax reforms started under Diocletian.

A manifestation of this power transformation is apparent in a reinterpretation of the decline of Roman building projects in the late third century. Originally attributed to the decline argument, new evidence indicates that the decline of building projects was more likely due to elite social behaviors, in that it was no longer beneficial to self-promote on a local level; instead, career jettisoning was much better served by appealing directly to the imperial center.⁴

To return to the subject matter, this mechanism of “self-Romanization” can be abstracted to permit application to the phenomena of elite Roman conversion in the fourth and fifth centuries. The adoption of the “Imperial Cult” of Constantine and his successors enabled an elite to more easily climb the ranks of Roman aristocracy. Later on, with official state adoption under Theodosius I, elite conversion became a requirement: conservatism would risk landed holdings in an increasingly oppressive state against Pagans.

This mechanism also prompts a reconsideration of Julian the Apostate, which Heather illustrates well.⁵ Traditionally, Julian’s attempt to resurrect elite paganism, repress the Christian trajectory, and establish a “Pagan Church” was viewed as a pointless bump in the otherwise teleological view of an emergent Christendom. This is a point Heather stresses: that such deterministic views are influenced by the prominence of European social frameworks of the modern era. That the success of Christianity, especially in its inceptive state, was not guaranteed. Heather points out that had discrete historical developments taken a different direction and “allowed him to hand on power to a pagan successor, there is no obvious reason to suppose that recently—and syncretically—converted Roman landowning elites would not have largely swung back in line (… with) Julian’s alternative vision…”⁶ With this view, the otherwise fruitless endeavor takes on a more ambiguous context; if Julian’s conquest in Mesopotamia had succeeded, what would have resulted?

Syncretism and the Grammarians

Heather introduces the notion of syncretism to provide an explanatory framework for the mechanisms of elite conversion in his study. In particular, the fourth-century syncretism focused on the traditional Latin grammarian practice, intense literary and comparative analysis using a Graeco-Roman philosophical framework, and its application by Roman Christians to tackling doctrinal distillation.

The Confessional State

To conclude the first phase of Heather’s survey, the emergence of the Roman confessional state is discussed. To do so, Heather first tackles a narrative surrounding the power relations of the ecclesiastical elite and the emperor. Heather argues that the common understanding, no doubt bolstered by Catholic writings, of St. Ambrose’s relationship with Valentinian II and Theodosius I is misunderstood. In particular, Heather presents an argument reframing the great triumphs, the removal of the pagan Altar of Victory and the application of penance by Theodosius I, as mere coincidental and overblown examples. Heather states that: “Ambrose magnificent exercise in self-promotion has exerted an almost hypnotic fascination over the years, but accepting it at face value both generates a misleading understanding of the bishop’s own prominence and has deeply distorting knock-on effects for our overall view of Church-state relations in the late fourth century.”⁷ Heather indicates that St. Ambrose’s late fourth-century power was far more a consequence of geographical coincidence than any manifestation of emergent bishopric power, pointing out that as the power centers moved from Milan in the early 390s, St. Ambrose’s political power quickly attenuated.

Instead Heather provides a framing of the Roman confessional state, one which, under doctrinal unification of the Nicene Creed and its mutation and reinforcement under the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, the Roman emperor became the center of the Christian church. This should not be surprising considering the power structure of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. It was the imperial center that controlled the vast resources to organize huge ecumenical councils, first shown with the Council of Nicaea.⁸ The emperor’s role in these councils was also nontrivial; emperor's were central to the dissemination of specific doctrinal arguments, Nicene Christianity under Constantine and Theodosius I and Homoean under Constantine II. It was also the emperors, through their control of state power, who were able to later suppress pagan centers of culture and unaligned Christian schisms, such as the Donatists.

What Heather argues is thus a counter to the thesis argued by Augustine in City of God. That the Roman Empire was a vessel through which God’s providence acted to spread Christianity.⁹ Instead the Church-state relations were inseparable, with the Church, at least the one adhered to by Augustine, dependent on the expansive state apparatus of the empire.

The “Dark Ages”

When Romulus Augustus was deposed by Odacer, Augustine’s City of God adopted near prophetical importance: the providence of God had used the Roman Empire as a means to spread the gospel and establish a Christian world. With the end of empire, where now would providence lead?

Heather makes an important note concerning the misleading moniker of the sixth to eighth centuries. Heather stresses that one compounding factor in the poor historiographical terminology is the lack of manuscripts dating from before the second half of the eighth century. Heather points out that this is less due to some apocalyptic decline in civilization where humanity (at least Christendom) lost its literate ability, and more due to the fact that eighth-century Carolingian copyists would often dispose of manuscripts once they had been copied.¹⁰

Alternative Christianities

The supposed solution to the Arian Schism, the Nicene Creed, resulted in further theological divisions. To resolve intense theological debate over the details concerning unification and yet distinction in the Trinitarian Godhead, Constantine settled on homoiousios, “of one substance,” to define the relation between God the Father and God the Son. Homoiousios introduced, to some, more issues than it resolved. While it had ended the Arian heresy, a doctrine viewed by critics to subserviate the Son to the Father, it introduced a lack of distinction between God the Father and God the Son. An alternative doctrine evolved around homoios, “like”; the Son was “like” the Father, as opposed to the Son having “similarity in essence” with the Father. This doctrine eventually was elevated after adoption by Constantine II.¹¹

Here Heather aptly reflects on his more general thesis, the aversion from a teleological view of the success and inevitability of Latin (Nicene) Christianity. Not only does Heather stress the relative success of Homoean Christianity in the post-Roman West, championed by the Burgundian, Ostrogothic, Suevi, Vandal, and Visigothic Kingdoms, but he also indicates that the reemergence of the dominance of Nicene Christianity was more in part due to political events than any inherent religious or ecclesiastical mechanism. In the Vandal Kingdom, repression of Nicene Christians indicated a trend in which various Nicene episcopal members adopted the Homoean line.

The real driver of the fall of Homoean Christianity was, firstly, the adoption of Nicene Christianity by the first Merovingian king, Clovis. Heather indicates that this too was not some deterministic result, with various Homoean influences, including converted kin circling Clovis’ court, but instead prompted by more political forces, in particular alliance with the Eastern Romans against the Visigothic kingdom. Finally the conquests under Justinian I during the early sixth-century drove a collapse of prominent Homoean dynasties, including the Vandals, then the Ostrogoths. The Visigoths in Spain would eventually adopt the Nicene line as well.¹²

Christian-Islamic Relations

In discussing the emergence of the Islamic confessional state in the latter half of the seventh century and the eighth century, Heather indicates that a similar self-Islamization existed, one which could be understood using the same model presented for self-Christianization of the provincial elite. The early period of Islamic conquest, facilitated by a vacuum caused by the dual destruction of the Roman and Sassanian empires by their early seventh-century wars, was characterized by a pseudo-colonial model. During the Umayyad Caliphate, Islamic rule generally consisted of an Arab garrison fort centered near a provincial populated center. The Arab conquerors would then redirect production surplus and levy taxes based on either the Roman or Sassanian systems. The general local political structures, particularly the tax systems and production administrations, were left in place with the surpluses simply redirected to the new overlords.¹³ Thus, the large majority of the Christian and Jewish communities were left mostly intact. Some early forms of mutation, however, did occur during this period due to Muslim rule. This included the emergence of the first Arabic Christian literature and, interestingly, a form of syncretism whereby Christian writings in Arabic adopted the Shahada, or at least the first half of it, “There is no god but God”.¹⁴

This new conceptualization Heather indicates is a function of new historical scholarship, which indicates that the Shurut Umar—a pact that outlined the details of the second-class citizenship of the dhimmis (non-Muslims)—is more likely attributed to Umayyad caliph Umar II as opposed to the traditional attribution to the Rashidun caliph Omar/Umar I. Regardless, the enforcement of the Islamic confessional state began under the rule of Umar II (717-720). A feature of the Shurut was the jizya, a poll tax levied against non-Muslims. Further legal subordination to the Muslim overclass was defined. The mechanism of self-Christianization may now be applied to this new epoch of Islamic rule. The same provincial elite, which required favorable relations with the state, were the first to be affected by the second class-citizenship.¹⁵ Thus the mass conversion of the late Umayyad period can be understood in the same terms that influenced mass elite conversion under the Roman confessional state.

The Carolingian Confessional State

The second phase of the book concerns itself with the reemergence of the Latin confessional state.

More Syncretism

Heather jumps the channel to summarize the spread of Latin Christianity among the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. The Gospels and the crucifixion of Christ transformed from a means of salvation for mankind to a glorious death for Christ, transformed into a warrior king. The Apostles develop from itinerant preachers to a band of warriors, a fusion of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture and the message of the Gospels.¹⁶ Likewise, traditional Romano-Christian apocryphal stories also transformed: the Harrowing of Hell—Christs mission to bring salvation to the righteous pre-Christian figures who had remained in Hell—was abrogated by Boniface to include those ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon elite they wished to convert.¹⁷

The point Heather emphasizes here, which returns in his sections concerning the consolidation of Christian doctrine under the Carolingian reforms and later under the Fourth Lateran Council, is that the post-Confessional State period left a gap in centralized liturgical doctrine and missionary projects. In the Anglo-Saxon world alone, the papal missions, ordered under Pope Gregory and executed under Augustine, were rivaled by the native Briton and Irish missions, which had centered on Iona. The decentralization of these practices permitted more active syncretism, which in turn resulted in the same sort of self-Christianization that was seen in the Constantinian period.

One of the insights I gained was the distinction between the more fluid, decentralized period—characterized by a demise in the confessional states, first Rome and, to a lesser extent, the breakup of the Carolingian domains—and the period under these confessional states. In particular, it was the period, prior to centralization, that permitted the mass conversion, in part due to the fusion of cultural norms for the target population and the Gospels. Whereas in the periods of immense centralization of the Church, the syncretic fashions of missionaries were curbed, restricting the effectiveness of missionary work.

A Frankish Renaissance?

One consequence of the collapse of the Roman Empire was the subsequent collapse of the grammarian Latin higher-educational system. This had less to do with a apocalyptic decline in civilization as portrayed in traditional accounts of the Dark Ages, and more to do with the decline of necessity. Heather points out that the grammarian educational tradition had been a pipeline for training Roman bureaucrats; elite forms of rhetoric and treatment of the Roman legal corpus provided the foundations for the Roman state bureaucrat. It was this pipeline that stimulated the grammarian schools and promoted the advanced literacy levels. This was not coincidental; the complexity and breadth of the Roman bureaucratic system following the reforms of the Tetrarchs required statesmen to possess serious levels of literacy. With the collapse of this large state system, the successor “small-state” polities of western Christendom contracted into more personal patronage systems. The demand for elite education faded away, and with it the advanced forms of literacy that were critical for the early forms of Roman syncretism and ecclesiastical uniformity.¹⁸ The consolidation of Western Europe under Charlemagne in the last quarter of the eighth century made it possible once again for a confessional state.

To begin, Heather tackles the narrative surrounding Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800. In particular, he pulls apart the notion of Charlemagne as an unwilling inheritor of the imperial title; this is counter to the papal presentation (also propagated by Carolingian court figures) of a papacy that chose the Frankish king as their guardian. The Carolingian ecclesiastical fusion with Frankish might began in the decades proceeding the coronation; Charlemagne himself had overseen ecumenical councils concerning iconoclastic measures undertaken by the Byzantines.¹⁹ Furthermore, the direct leverage Charlemagne held over the Pope can not be ignored, for it was Pope Leo himself who had fled imprisonment and sought sanctuary in the king’s court.²⁰ Thus just a month prior to Charlemagne’s coronation, the Pope had been reinstated in Rome under the auspices of the king.

There are reasons as to why such a narrative was presented. From the perspective of the Frankish Kings, adhering to the spirit of Cincinnatus, it was a common trope that those who sought imperial office were the least appropriate for such a position. More importantly, however, it was the papacy that propagated much of the narrative concerning the coronation dynamics. It was the papacy that sought to legitimize its corpus of forgeries, two critically: the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery that legitimized Pope Sylvester, and by extension his heirs, as the inheritors of authority over the western Empire²¹; less important, though still critical, was the Clementine Recognitions, a fourth-century forgery that claimed St. Peter as the Pope of Rome and defined his successors as the inheritors of this paramount title.²²

The reform movement under Charlemagne and his court clerics was correctio. The main fault, identified by the learned scholars of Charlemagne, was the educational and literacy gap, which had been produced with the collapse of the Roman grammarian school. State funds, comprising an enormous 10% of GDP, were directed at ecclesiastical reforms aimed to manifest the educational programs designed by the clerical advisors of the court.²³ Louis the Pious continued his father’s enforcement of strict adherence to administrative and doctrinal standards; in particular, was the cathedral and monastic reforms centered around the Rules of Chrodegang (in the case of cathedral reform) and the Rules of Benedict (for monasteries).²⁴

The educational reforms centered around building a common base for literary materials available to the expanding pastoral churches. With a massive, rapid increase in the number of churches, it was critical to the clerical administration that these churches share a general body of literary material.²⁵ Heather indicates that the impact of the programs should not be underestimated. He summarizes that:

“By the end of this process, around the year 1000, the crucial, well-defined minimum knowledge base of Latin Christianity was shared across several hundred institutions, all of which maintained schools equipped with sufficient libraries to transmit that knowledge safely on from generation to generation. As a direct result, opportunities for the kinds of breaches of accepted tradition - which had, for instance, allowed sixth- and seventh-century Irish clerics to use the Old Testament conveniently to license royal polygamy, and to offer alternative interpretations of the Harrowing of Hell - were drastically curtailed.”²⁶

Christian Conquests

The conquests of the Carolingians coincided with the expansion of Christendom in northern and eastern Euorpe. There were two distinct versions of this Christianization: coercive and missionary-based.²⁷ By the sword, Charlemagne forced the cross on much of northern Europe. This included the Saxons, a thorn in the side of the Frankish conquest. Initial attempts to convert the Saxon elite led to a famed execution of 4500 Saxons on the shores of the Weser.²⁸ Similarly, the coercive conversion missions on the Elbe Slavs led to a near two-century long pagan insurgency.²⁹ Less violent measures were in some cases advocated by high-ranking members of Charlemagne’s clerical circle, including Alcuin of York.

One feature I found intriguing was the political balancing act of post-Carolingian Europe and its relation to Christian expansion. Particular case studies, namely the Piasts in Poland and the Premyslids in Bohemia. An interesting argument posits that papal missions, which had varying success in both regions, were inextricably linked to the internal and external political conflicts in the region. What occurred was again a case of self-Christianization, in that the secular rulers of these lands appealed to the papacy, not only for the ideological benefits of the confessional state but also to balance the Carolingian (and later Ottonian and Salian) hegemony, one of the hegemonic arms being the missions commissioned by the Frankish and Saxon confessional states.³⁰

The Emergence of the Papacy

Crusades

Heather points out, a fact I found in many other dealings of the Crusading enterprise, that the First Crusade owed as much of its success to luck as anything else. The ill-prepared and undermanned armies really had no business climbing the walls of Jerusalem at the turn of the century. Heather presents two interesting arguments in his summary of the Crusades in Chapter 12. Firstly, he points out the secular factors inducing elite participation in the Crusades. In particular, the effects of primogeniture, which enforced a principle line of inheritance so as to avoid the exponential division of elite estates amongst the branching descendants. A consequence of this was, in effect, the emergence of a large disinherited class of second sons, those who were excluded from the inheritance of large estates and thus authority among the feudal landscape. It was this class that formed the basis of the crusading mercenary band of elites who lurched for any chance to acquire lands in Outremer or Reconquestia Spain. Thus Pope Urban II’s appeal to the defenders of Christendom in Clermont in 1095 fell on the ears of many disenfranchised elites who looked east to secure their fortunes.³¹

Heather goes on to describe the papal role in the Crusades, in particular the notion of a papal foreign policy. What Heather argues in the papal commissioning of the Crusades (and their other variants in Spain and the Baltics) represented dually an indication of the growing authority of the Bishop of Rome, as well as his own self-promotion. The popes had very little direct control over the Crusade campaigns, either led by populist peasant armies or secular elites and later kings. In addition, the administration of the colonies in Outremer was largely independent of direct papal authority, though the dependence on supplies from the west should not be underestimated.

Intellectual Reforms

Heather tackles the intellectual revolutions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Christendom. In particular, he points out the importance of comparative legal studies and their eventual influence on the intellectual treatment of canonical law. Heather identifies the Justinian Digest, a sixth-century corpus of Roman law that had been rediscovered in Italy at the turn of the millennium. The text sought to reconcile the various contradictions in Roman legal precedence and establish an official legal authority. The intellectual legal studies of the Digest was centered around the University of Bologna in the thirteenth century, and what emerged from these schools, much improved in its later form by Accursius, a Florentine lawyer, was the gloss. This logical dissection of the legal corpus sought to organize legal content by its focus, provide interpretation, indicate contradiction, and provide a mechanism for identifying authority.³²

This comparative legal study of Roman law bled over into the study of canonical law. The twelfth century saw the first treatments of canonical law in this fashion; for instance, Gratians Decretum, who himself was an attendant at the intellectual center in Bologna, applied the comparative Roman study to the issues concerning the ecclesiastical legal corpus.³³

Legitimization through Forgery

A corollary of the emergence of a comparative was a mechanism under which contradicting decisions could be reconciled: a papal decretal. This mechanism combined with the much larger process of acquisition of (suspect) legal materials, that identified the Church in Rome as a definitive authority in Latin Christendom. The body of this work was the Pseudo-Isidore, a collection of legal precedents that reinforced the Pope’s legitimacy.³⁴ Coupled with the aforementioned Donation of Constatine, identifying Pope Slyvester and his successors as the prime authority in the Western Roman Domains, and the Clementine Recognitions, reinforcing the primacy of the Bishop of Rome above the other Church Patriarchs, the Pseudo-Isidore, along with the legal mechanisms of appeals to Papal decretals, established the missing piece to Papal consolidation of religious power: actual authority.

The centuries prior to the establishment of a canonical legal framework, the Roman Church had worked, first through its relations with the Carolingians, to establish legitimacy, specifically to provide a reason for the Bishop of Rome’s seniority over the other Patriarchs (Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem) but authority had been missing. The actual mechanisms under which papal reform and enforcement of doctrinal and ecclesiastical standards for Christendom were vague and ineffectual. There is a reason why the early post-Roman religious reforms of Christendom originated in the clerical circles of the Frankish courts. Even with a clear body of reform measures, the Pope had few enforcement mechanisms. It was not until a legal framework that established the supremacy of the Church in Rome that papal power really emerged.

There were three factors that aided in this emergence alongside the legal framework: the Islamic conquests in the East, the relative decline of the Roman Empire in Constantinople, and the decline of Carolingian hegemony in the West. The first decreased the power of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, especially as mentioned above, the mass conversion of the landed elite in the caliphates. The decline of the Carolingian, and later Ottonian and Salian Empires, provided an entrance for real Papal authority. Firstly, the decline of Ottonian power in Italy provided a path for the assertion of Papal independence. The Papacy of the tenth century had long been a tool under which the secular Ottonian rulers, but also the central Italian elites, had used to extract the patrimony of papal lands in central Italy and control the Church. But the political opportunity in the latter half of the eleventh century enabled Pope Nicholas II to align with the Sicilian Normans to consolidate Papal lands in southern Italy.³⁵ Heather reinforces the importance of this development, arguing that

“Without this pact, Nicholas and his immediate successors would have stood no chance of maintaining their newly asserted independence against the two powers that had long since swapped control of the papal see: the Empire, on the one hand, and central Italian aristocratic networks like the Tusculani on the other.”³⁶

Heather goes on to argue that it was these two foundations—a codified legal corpus (comprising mainly of eighth-century forgeries), which had been disseminated to the various church parishes via the correctio ecclesiastical reforms, and the growing independence of the Papacy in the shifting of power balance of post-Carolingian Europe—that permitted the consolidation of effective authority of the Papacy.

The effects of this development were manifest in the growing fashion of decretal-based rulings by the Pope Eugenius III through to Alexander III. Often these decretals were in effect restatements of the original requests, mostly due to the administrative constraints in managing twelfth-century Christendom. But nonetheless the revolution indicated that the political project of Rome had succeeded in “plac(ing) the papacy at the heart of the practical operations of Latin Christendom.”³⁷ The burgeoning universities of Western Christendom, Bologna, Oxford, and Paris, appealed to Rome for official chartering, including the permission for educators to levy fees on their new students, in order to support the growing Christian intelligentsia. It was these centers for education where the Roman comparative methods were applied to canonical law to produce the important Christian glosses, such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which articulated a unified notion of Catholic sacrament and elucidated the complex theological nuances concerning purgatory.³⁸

The sacramental and piety definitions, articulated and codified in these centers of Christian education, direct inheritors to the reforms of correctio begun three centuries prior, were central to the definition of doctrinal piety outlined in the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Heather indicates that the influence of these educational and operational reforms centered around an authoritative papacy resulted in a moment where:

“at the fourth Lateran council, the leaders of Latin Christianity assembled by Pope Innocent III could give their imprimatur to a highly developed theory of how and why the individual might be saved, and, simultaneously, pass a series of practice regulations for the operations of a parish delivery system of unprecedented reach, through which it might all be put into practice”³⁹

Thus, correctio, the Pseudo-Isidore, Roman comparative legal studies, the emergence of theological educational institutions, and the expanse of European churches, all subservient to Rome, meant that the Pope had risen above the disparate secular rulers of the West and represented an authoritative figure of Christendom.

To close, Heather indicates two important features in the expansion of Lateran IV piety, other than the system of parish networks with all roads leading to Rome. Firstly Heather illustrates the relative adaptiveness of the church to absorb populist preaching movements that emerged in the twelfth century. These movements threatened the ideological base of Roman centralization, which sermons were to be centered around the papally commissioned corpus of material. Initial repressions were replaced by absorption with the establishment of the Franciscan and Dominican mendicant orders. These fused the populist preaching movements with an educational base surmounted in the papal-chartered theological institutions, such as those established in Oxford.⁴⁰ Lastly, Heather after having outlined the actual function and effectiveness of the Inquisitions, underlines how the emergence of a repressive police state aided in the dissemination and alignment of Church order and popular practice with the piety espoused by Lateran IV.⁴¹

Conclusion

I’ve tried to compile here my disparate notes from my reading of Heather’s wide sweeping survey of Christendom. There are many topics on which Heather expands that I have not included in my summary, either due to my lack of grasp of the arguments and material or more likely, a reflection of my historical interests. I’d certainly recommend this book to any of those interested in the history of European Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church (to a lesser extent the Orthodox Church), or more generally European history in the post-Roman, pre-Renaissance period.

I would say, as written in the introduction above, that Heather certainly achieved one of his stated goals: explaining how a first-century apocalyptic ascetic Jewish cult developed into a continent-wide confessional religion. What I am left with after my reading is an understanding of the evolution of European Christendom. In particular, its absolute dependence on a confessional state in its early form, acting as an enforcement mechanism for elite-based adoption and later mass-based peasantry adoption. Likewise, it was the intellectual efforts surrounding the elucidation of a corpus of material and its early malleability that enabled syncretism to adapt to the various cultures Christianity interacted with. A period of granularity was overcome due to reforms pushed by a powerful European hegemon in which a standard body of literature emerged and common ecclesiastical standards were established. Finally, its interdependence on the large hegemonic Confessional state was severed when, by the tenth century, a legal framework had been established and an interconnected system of churches subservient to a new authority, independent from the secular hegemons, which came and went.

I am lastly left with the feeling of indeterminism, as argued in the introduction by Heather, under which the theory of teleological Christian, and more so Catholic, Christianity seems far more lucky. What would have happened if Constantine’s successors had moved back to the far more elite-rooted pagan practices? What would have happened if the conquests in Mesopotamia had resulted in a more long-lasting rule of Julian the Apostate? What would have happened if the Homoean Christian Confessional states had survived the dynamism of Justinian’s rule? What if Clovis had adopted Homoean Christianity, or perhaps remained pagan? What if the Islamic conquests had failed, perhaps in a counterfactual account where Rome and the Sassanid Empires had not destroyed each other? What would be the role of more powerful Eastern Patriarchs?

1. Friedrich Kaulbach, The Coronation of Charlemagne, 1861, Munich, https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13841/coronation-of-charlemagne/.

2. Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

3. Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 93. For the full argument relating to the previous precedent set by “self-Romanization” see 91-102.

4. Peter Heath, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 2006), 115-116. Chapter 3, Limits of Empire, Heather more generally deals with the economic transformation from the Crisis to Constantine.

5. Peter Heather, Christendom, 137-149.

6. Peter Heather, Christendom, 149.

7. Peter Heather, Christendom, 113.

8. Peter Heather, Christendom, 128-129.

9. Peter Heather, Christendom, 123-124.

10. Peter Heather, Christendom, 332.

11. Peter Heather, Christendom, 30-35. This is the area I am fuzziest on, so take my summary with a mountain of salt, as the distinctions are based on my rough notes from Heather’s own summary. One additional point I’ll note is the distinction between Homoean Christianity and Arianism. In Heather’s previous work, the Goths were presented as Arians. This seems correct to me, with the Ulfias Gothic scriptural work adopting Arianism. But in discussing the Gothic successor kingdoms, as I recall, Heather calls them Arians. Now I’m not sure when exactly it would be appropriate to indicate the Goths went from Arian to Homoean. On page 158, while discussing the emergent Homoean Christian states, the Visigoths, Vandals, and Burgundians “and, soon, too, Ostrogoths.”. I’m not sure if this indicates that the Ostrogoths were the relics of the Arian origins of Gothic Christianity and at some point adopted the Homoean position, or if this is just in reference to the eventual establishment of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Theodoric’s eventual deposition of Odacer.

12. Peter Heather, Christendom, 162-193. Heather outlines key elements of the argument in this section: the conversion of Clovis, the conquests of Justinian.

13. Peter Heather, Christendom, 222.

14. Peter Heather, Christendom, 224-225.

15. Peter Heather, Christendom, 225-226.

16. Peter Heather, Christendom, 266-267.

17. Peter Heather, Christendom, 270.

18. Peter Heather, Christendom, 356-357.

19. Peter Heather, Christendom, 375.

20. Peter Heather, Christendom, 379-381.

21. Peter Heather, Christendom, 376.

22. Peter Heather, Christendom, 445-446.

23. Peter Heather, Christendom, 420-421.

24. Peter Heather, Christendom, 421-422.

25. Peter Heather, Christendom, 433. Heather notes that the church building projects in the post-Carolingian era varied by region. In some regions of northern Italy, the number of churches doubled after AD 1000. Between the tenth and thirteenth century England saw over six thousand new churches constructed.

26. Peter Heather, Christendom, 425.

27. This division of course was not completely clear and there was overlap. But for the subsequent case studies it is cleaner to divide them this way.

28. Peter Heather, Christendom, 388-390.

29. Peter Heather, Christendom, 392-393.

30. Peter Heather, Christendom, 396-402.

31. Peter Heather, Christendom, 484-487.

32. Peter Heather, Christendom, 495-496.

33. Peter Heather, Christendom, 496-499.

34. Peter Heather, Christendom, 448-449. Heather also discusses the Pseudo-Isidore and its relation to other Papal forgeries more generally in 457-461.

35. Prior to reading Heather’s work, my only experience with the history of the Papacy in 8th, 9th, and 10th century Italy (other than some summary treatments in textbooks) was Paul Collins’s The Birth of the West. I very much enjoyed his survey of European Christendom in the 9th century. Collins provides a great summary of the various rival Italian factions in pages 33 through 89. One divergence between these two texts I found interesting was their handling of the so-called Peace of God. Collins devotes a few pages to the peace movement in his survey of West Francia (175-177). Collins asserts that “While the spread and the effectiveness of the peace of have has been widely acknowledged, there is considerable debate as to its ultimate effectiveness” (Birth of the West, 177). In consolidating his general thesis, the basis of Western civilization being rooted in the emergence of a central Roman Church, Collins further argues that the Peace of God acted as a unifying cause in the anarchic Western Frankish territories during the collapse of Carolingian hegemony, that “The Peace of God was beginning the process of confronting the feudal warlords of France with community action and church sanctions” (Birth of the West, 424). This is in contrast to Heather’s diametric assertions that Collins’s perception of the Peace movements represent the now-cast-aside historical narrative that “The disappearance of Carolingian monarchic power in western Francia did entrench the power of local lordships - but this was no sudden revolution. Nor was the general political character of the times particularly anarchic. Although under ecclesiastical leadership, still more to the point, the Peace and Truce councils were not manifestation of the Churchmen desperately trying to preserve lives and order” (Christendom, 517-518). I’m not sure what to make of this contrast in accounts. Collins seems to rely on primary accounts from monks in Western Francia and Rodulfus Glaber Historiarum Libri Quinque III-IV, an 11th-century Benedictine chronicler. Heather, on the other hand, cites more recent scholarship in his endnotes. Heather only treats the subject of the Peace movements with a single paragraph, so I gather from his perspective that he views it as a revised note of historical insignificance. I have not read either of the cited sources, so I don’t have too much stake in the game. Personally, I did note, at least in my eyes, a bias in Collins's survey, which may be due to his role as a Catholic priest for thirty years (for instance, see page 321-322 for his thoughts on the intellectual left). Nonethless, I did enjoy his book and would recommend it for its interesting perspective on some issues. Paul Collins, The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and The Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014).

36. Peter Heather, Christendom, 466.

37. Peter Heather, Christendom, 500.

38. Peter Heather, Christendom, 522-531.

39. Peter Heather, Christendom, 530.

40. Peter Heather, Christendom, 546-555.

41. Peter Heather, Christendom, 560-567.