Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages
Brett Edward Whalen
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0674036298
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Brett Whalen explores the compelling belief that Christendom would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. During the High Middle Ages―an era of crusade, mission, and European expansion―the Western followers of Rome imagined the future conversion of Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Eastern Christians into one fold of God’s people, assembled under the authority of the Roman Church.
Starting with the eleventh-century papal reform, Whalen shows how theological readings of history, prophecies, and apocalyptic scenarios enabled medieval churchmen to project the authority of Rome over the world. Looking to Byzantium, the Islamic world, and beyond, Western Christians claimed their special place in the divine plan for salvation, whether they were battling for Jerusalem or preaching to unbelievers. For those who knew how to read the signs, history pointed toward the triumph and spread of Roman Christianity.
Yet this dream of Christendom raised troublesome questions about the problem of sin within the body of the faithful. By the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, radical apocalyptic thinkers numbered among the papacy’s most outspoken critics, who associated present-day ecclesiastical institutions with the evil of Antichrist―a subversive reading of the future. For such critics, the conversion of the world would happen only after the purgation of the Roman Church and a time of suffering for the true followers of God.
This engaging and beautifully written book offers an important window onto Western religious views in the past that continue to haunt modern times.
that created “the consciousness of an identity of Christian society.”5 Tomaé Mastnak likewise insists that the First Crusade represented a “symbolic point when Christendom became a living reality,” thereby forming the “first Western union.”6 Most recently, Christopher Tyerman has proclaimed that the “wars of the cross” created “a shared sense of belonging to a Christian society, societas christiana, Christendom, and contributed to setting its human and geographic frontiers. In these ways, the
presentations of the sermon. First, the pope declared that Christian warriors needed to end the “wrong” kind of violence, meaning their brigandage and constant warfare with each other, and to substitute in its place the “right” kind of force [ 51 ] d o m i n i o n o f g o d to assist the Eastern Christians, who were being assailed by infidels. This campaign meant more than military assistance to the beleaguered Byzantine Empire. Ascribing words to Urban, the chroniclers of the First Crusade
movement of imperial power from Constantinople to the Franks in the time of Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel, confirmed the movement of grace from the Greeks to the Latins. The abbot placed this event under the fourth seal, from Emperor Justinian to Popes Gregory III (r. 731–741) and Zachary (r. 741–752), when “the patronage of the Roman Church was removed from the emperors at Constantinople and bestowed upon Charles, ruler of the Franks, and his successors.”44 In Joachim’s generational
enabled the spread of Christ’s message. From this perspective, Constantine’s open patronage of the Christian faith and his creation of the imperial church formed a new stage in historical prog ress. Perhaps such enthusiasm was natural from the emperor’s biographer, but Eusebius hardly stood alone in his belief that the Roman Empire had a unique role to play in the fulfillment of history.18 Considerable room lay between the poles of demonizing empire and uncritically celebrating its virtues.
Church. The mendicants took a hand in bringing this reconciliation about.35 In 1232, a band of Franciscans returning from captivity among the Muslims met with the Greek patriarch, Germanus II, before returning to the papal curia with letters from Germanus that broached the subject of restoring communion between the two churches. Responding to this overture, Pope Gregory IX dispatched two Dominicans, Hugh and Peter of Sézanne, and two Franciscans, Haymo of Faversham and Rodulph of Reims, as his