Session 11: The Gospel and Culture Interact
Session 11 The Gospel and Culture Interact—East
and West
Today we will review the expansion of the church during the 300 years
of 1000 to 1300 and the evangelization of Northern Europe and Iberia.
The Inquisition in the Middle Ages was the church’s response to
heresy, which it sought to eliminate by force.
The Roman Catholics advanced into Asia,
particularly China, in the High Middle Ages. If the church had responded
differently to the Mongols, the history of the world would have been quite
different.
Objectives
At the end of this lesson, participants should
• describe the movements of the church into Northern Europe
• discuss the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Iberia
during this period
• appreciate the efforts of Ramon Lull to evangelize the Muslims
• discuss the reasons for the Inquisition
• develop a consciousness of the ways the Church can misuse the
authority of God in
the Christian life
• describe the attempts of monks to evangelize Asia in the High Middle
Ages
• Consider the failures of Christian attempts to evangelize Asia, and
what might have
happened if Christians had been able to convert
the Mongols
A. Read: Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, chapters
22
Write a Big
Idea paragraph on your reading.
B. Read the following articles and give a one paragraph
answer to the question asked.
1. The
Expansion of the Church in Europe
What do you know about Muslims today?
2. The Inquisition
What teachings today should the Church label as heretical?
3.The
Catholic Church in China and the Mongol Empire.
What opportunities for evangelism is the Church missing out on today?
C. Write in your journal. Reflect on and respond to the
following:
AUGUSTINE’S
CONFESSIONS, READING `10
The Expansion of the
Church in Europe
Missionary Activity in Europe
Refer to Resource 11-1 in the Student Guide;
Resource 11-2 is a map.
One thousand years after Christ, there were still
large areas of Europe to be evangelized.
Scandinavia possessed a warlike culture that occasionally,
as in the eighth century, launched out to attack and plunder areas of Europe.
Vikings, the Norse, devastated Ireland in raid after raid between 800 and 850,
and had pillaged and destroyed many ancient monasteries. Vikings established a
pagan kingdom in Dublin that endured from 850 to 1150. The Danes attacked
England and established a kingdom there as well as in Sweden. But both the
Vikings and the Danes were ready to “make room for a Christian deity alongside
the traditional gods,” as historian Richard Fletcher puts it.
In the early eleventh century Norway was still
made up of various kingdoms or chiefdoms. One king, Haakon, had been raised and
educated in England, and introduced Christianity during his reign, 946-961. A bishop
was consecrated about 960.
Tradition has it nonetheless that Christianity
came to
Norway in 995 through Olaf Tryggvason, who had
been baptized in England in 994. Accompanied by an English bishop, Olaf
returned to Norway in 995 in pursuit of a throne. During the next four years,
he attempted to convert the people by force.
Olaf Haraldsson, a kinsman, who ruled from 1015
to 1028, carried on the work. Not content with nominal acceptance of
Christianity, he admonished priests and bishops to instruct the people well in
the faith. Yet paganism persisted, and Christianity itself was modified by
Norwegian ways and traditions. In 1152 the Norwegian church declared itself
independent of all church officials except the pope himself.
Iceland accepted Christianity by a democratic
process. Iceland had been settled in the late ninth and early tenth centuries
predominantly by Norwegians, but including Irish and Scottish people who had
already embraced Christianity.
It is likely that Icelanders themselves sought
Christian missionaries from Norway to evangelize their country. Since the
Germans were actively engaged in missions in Norway, Thangbrand, a German
bishop, arrived in Iceland sometime in the eleventh century. It is said that
Christianity became the state religion of Iceland by an act of the country’s
parliament about 1016. Christianity brought literacy, Latin, a written law, theology,
and history.
This created a dramatic break with previous
customs, which had included offering human sacrifices to the gods. The church
remained attached to the bishop of Norway. The first Icelander bishop, Islef,
was educated in Germany in the eleventh century. Islef established a theological
school.
The Danes had many contacts with their Christian neighbors
to the south. The Danish King Harald Bluetooth, who ruled from 958 to 987, was
a Christian. Under his rule, churches were built throughout the country.
His son Sweyn initiated raids on England. Sweyn’s
son Canute, who reigned from 1016 to 1035, continued the conquest of England
and extended Danish rule over Norway. Canute came under the influence of an
English archbishop, Wulfstan of York, who explained the ways of Christian faith
more clearly.
Canute made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1027. He established
a close unity between the state and ecclesiastical structure and required his
subjects to learn the Lord’s Prayer and attend communion at least three times
each year. Canute invited missionaries from England to evangelize Denmark, but
kept them tightly under his control. Bishop Adalbert of Hamburg, seeing himself
as a kind of patriarch for the church in the North, became jealous of the
English intervention in Denmark.
In Sweden, King Olof Skotkunung, who ruled from
995 to 1022, founded a bishopric at Skara and accepted missionaries from
Germany. Later in the eleventh century missionaries also arrived from England,
and possibly Poland and Russia.
In 1104 the pope appointed a bishop to Lund,
Sweden, to serve over all of Scandinavia. Missionaries commonly smashed pagan idols
and burned pagan temples. In the 1080s the king himself attacked a pagan cult
at Uppsala. But Sweden remained pagan. In the 1130s King Sverker called upon
austere Cistercian monks to evangelize the country. A bishop for Uppsala, a
Cistercian, was appointed in 1164. But old superstitions long remained.
Finland was at war with Sweden during these
years. Swedish settlements in Finland established Christianity. An indigenous
bishop was appointed in 1291. Not until that date can the country be said to be
Christianized.
Christianity entered Poland through Bohemia and Germany.
A Polish prince was baptized in the late tenth century. But the growth of
Christianity in Poland awaited his son, Boleslaw Chrobry, who reigned from 992
to 1025. Boleslaw encouraged missionary activity and established an
archbishopric and hierarchy that assured the church’s independence from
Germany. He unified the kingdom, but at great cost. After his death the kingdom
broke apart, churches and monasteries were destroyed, and priests and bishops
driven out or killed. Yet Christianity in Poland persisted amid the political
chaos.
Paganism proved resistant in the Baltic region of
northeastern Europe. Many evangelists sent from Denmark, Poland, Russia, and
Germany were martyred. During the Crusades, the Order of Teutonic Knights was
given authority by the pope to evangelize and conquer by force, with the
enticement that the order could retain two-thirds of any pagan lands it took,
reserving the other third for the church.
The Dominicans arrived alongside the Teutonic Knights.
The Knights conquered Prussia about 1250. Christianity was forced upon the
people through the treaty imposed. Any who lapsed into paganism, the treaty
stipulated, were to be reduced to slavery. The provisions also enforced
monogamy and the order of Christian worship, which included the requirements to
confess to a priest once a year and take communion at Easter time.
The kingdom of Lithuania held out longer against
the Knights. Finally, they allied themselves with Poland in order to defeat the
Knights, on the condition that the Lithuanian king, Jogaila, who was to wed a
Polish princess, unite the kingdoms of Poland and Luthuania, and be baptized.
Jogaila was baptized in 1385. This marked the official end of paganism in
Europe. Missionaries from Poland evangelized Lithuania.
Success in Iberia
Refer to Resource 11-3 in the Student Guide
The Crusades against the Muslims in the Holy
Lands naturally turned the church’s attention toward Spain, which had been
under Muslim rule since the eighth century. The Christian reconquest of Spain
began in 1002. During the next five centuries the churches in Spain conformed
to Roman Catholic practices through the zeal and influence of French clergy.
During the twelfth century both the Knights and the Cistercians arrived. The
thirteenth century brought the Dominicans and Franciscans.
Ramon Lull (1235-1315) was a philosopher and lay missionary
to the Muslims in Spain. Born to aristocracy, Lull’s native area of Spain, Majorca,
had only recently been freed from Muslim control. At the age of 30 Lull had a
profound conversion experience and professed a call from God to devote himself
fulltime to His service, and particularly to evangelize the Muslims.
In order to prepare himself for this task, Lull
spent nine years studying both Arabic and Christian thought. He began to
publish apologetic works aimed at the Muslims and persuaded the king to set up
a study center for the study of Islam and Arabic. Thirteen Franciscans enrolled
for study.
Lull himself became a Franciscan. Their approach
to the conversion of the Muslims, peaceful preaching and humble persuading,
appealed to him. Lull wrote: I see many knights go to the Holy Land beyond the sea,
wanting to conquer it by force of arms, and in the end they are all brought to
naught without obtaining their aim. Therefore it seems to me, O Lord, that the
conquest of that Holy Land should not be done but in the manner in which you
and your apostles have conquered it: by love and prayers and shedding of tears
and blood.
Lull’s approach to the Muslims was based on three
principles.
• First, missionaries should have a comprehensive, accurate knowledge of
the language. There needed to be colleges to teach these languages along with theological
education.
• Second, he believed the Muslims would be won with rational arguments,
and without recourse to Scripture, since Muslims rejected its authority. He spoke
of God in monotheistic ways that Muslims and Jews as well as Christians could accept.
He made extensive use of diagrams and charts as well as Neoplatonist
philosophy.
• Third, missionaries must be ready to sacrifice themselves. That Lull
himself was martyred in North Africa is open to question.
Lull’s ideas possessed mystic tendencies. He
centered his contemplations upon divine perfections, which, he said, was
achieved by the purification of memory, understanding, and will. He defended
the immaculate conception of Mary. Lull elaborated his idea in a number of
books and tracts.
For about 10 years, 1287 to 1297, Lull traveled throughout
Europe to elicit the support of the monarchs for the evangelization of the
Muslims. He secured centers of Arabic language study in five universities. He
also undertook missions to North Africa.
In 1299 he persuaded the king of Aragon to force
the Muslims and Jews to attend instruction in Christianity. Protected by the
crown, Lull himself began preaching in synagogues and mosques in Aragon. Even
later in life, in 1305, Lull admonished the pope in the Crusade to the Holy
Land, to first send as an advance party, friars well trained in both Arabic and
apologetics to preach to the Muslims. If the Muslims refused the Good News, force
was tolerable, Lull now believed. At least some Muslims, he was confident,
would be responsive to public disputations and preaching.
Jews as well as Muslims in Iberia were pressed by
force to convert to Christianity. At the same time, Christians did not trust
the conversions. They feared that Jews maintained their own customs secretly,
and that there was an alliance between Jews and Muslims. The Christians imposed
the Inquisition, which forced neighbor to report on neighbor, in an attempt to discover
and root out false conversions. The Christianization process in Iberia was
completed only in 1492, after the union of the kingdoms of Castille and Aragon,
and the defeat at Granada of the remaining Muslims.
The Inquisition
The Dissenting Groups
Refer to Resource 11-4 in the Student Guide.
In 1022 a group of heretics were condemned at the
Council of Orleans. The heretical movement spread from southern France to
northern Italy and Germany. In France the heretics were called Albigenses. In Germany
they were called Catharists—from the Greek, katharos, pure. They were
also known as the Patarenes.
These heretics were dualists. They rejected flesh
and matter as evil and saw matter and spirit in eternal conflict. With both a
soul and a body, human beings lived in a “mixed” state. Redemption was the
liberation of the soul from the flesh. There were two classes of believers,
these heretics taught. The “perfect” were those who received the baptism of the
Holy Spirit by the imposition of hands, and who lived by the strictest rules,
and were celibate. Below them were ordinary believers.
These heretics were not only dualists but also Docetists.
Christ was not fully incarnate, but like an angel. He did not suffer, die, or
rise from the dead. The Old and New Testaments were filled with allegories, which
the heretics believed the Catholic Church wrongly interpreted literally. Refer to Resource 11-5 in the
Student Guide.
The heretics rejected the sacraments,
indulgences, and various doctrines, including purgatory and the resurrection of
the body. All matter was bad; therefore, they lived self-denying, very strict
lives. In ascetic practices, they exceeded monks. As pacifists, they refused to
take up arms. The most vigorous condemned marriage. They were vegetarians,
refusing milk, butter, cheese, eggs, and meat.
These heretics actively attempted to boycott and disrupt
the Catholic Church. They issued propaganda against the Catholic Church. They
thought of themselves as the only true church. They excited extreme reaction
but welcomed suffering—to the point of committing suicide—and martyrdom.
Refer to Resource 11-5 in the Student Guide.
An unrelated group, also considered heretics by
the church, were the Waldensians. These were followers of Peter Valdo who died
about 1215, a rich merchant of Lyons. Beginning in southern France, the
movement spread to northern Italy and Austria. They believed they represented
an unbroken tradition stretching back to Paul’s trip from Rome to Spain.
About 1173, Valdo heard Christ’s words to the
rich young man in Matthew 19:12 to sell all he had and give his money to the
poor, and he obeyed literally. Valdo separated from his wife, placed his
daughters in a convent, and set off as an itinerant preacher. He preached
against the worldliness of the church and its priests, and against the dualism
of the Catharists.
Unlike the Albigenses or Catharists, Waldensian
beliefs regarding Christ were strictly orthodox. Valdo sought papal recognition
for his movement at the Third Lateran Council of 1179. Not only did the pope
refuse, but the Council of Verona in 1184 placed the Waldensians under the ban
of excommunication along with the Catharists.
So the Waldensians separated from the Roman Catholic
Church. They doubted the efficacy of sacraments given by unworthy priests, and
so appointed their own preachers. Without the church’s consent, Waldensians
used lay preachers, including women.
These preachers used local languages to proclaim
the Scripture. On biblical bases they denied purgatory, refused to pray for the
dead or venerate the saints and relics. They emphasized the Sermon on the
Mount, refused to kill for any reason, and lived simply.
The Church’s Response
In the early centuries, the means by which the
church controlled heresy was the threat of excommunication. However, after the
church became the official religion of the empire, it allowed the state to
resort to physical punishment, even death, to control heretics.
Even so, many medieval church leaders, including Bernard
of Clairveaux, counseled the church to use appropriately Christian means against
heresy, and decried the use of force. Nonetheless, the 1179 Third Lateran
Council sanctioned the state’s use of force to suppress heresy.
In 1184 Pope Lucius inaugurated the Inquisition
by making it mandatory for bishops to examine their people once a year and to
require of them an oath attesting to their orthodoxy. The term “inquisition”
and “inquisitor” came from the Roman law and were taken over from the Roman
Empire.
The church became threatened by the Catharists, Albigenses,
and Waldensians. Various councils, including the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),
condemned their teachings. Pope Innocent III sent out missions to combat the
heresy, and finally an armed and cruel crusade that ended in 1218.
The Dominicans became involved in refuting them.
Yet the common person was impressed by the austerity of the heretics’ lives,
which they contrasted to the moral laxity of many clergy and monks, and the
movements severely threatened the church.
In 1232 Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), who was
also king of Sicily, issued an edict calling upon state officials to find and
punish heretics. Pope Gregory IX (1148-1241) had several struggles with
Frederick for control over Italian lands. Fearing that the state would take
over what was truly a task for the church, realizing the failures of earlier
attempts to uproot the heretics, and taking away control from the local bishops,
Gregory centralized the church’s response and appointed inquisitors responsible
to himself.
The Council of Toulouse in 1229 sanctioned the Inquisition
in order to free the church totally from unorthodox beliefs. In 1231 Gregory
issued an edict excommunicating all heretics in general, and mentioning in
particular the Catharists, Albigenses, and Waldensians. Those suspected of heresy
should be thoroughly examined, and if recommended for punishment, handed over
to the state. Indeed, secular rulers lent support to the church in the
uprooting of supposed heretics.
Laypersons were expected to report on their
neighbors if they believed them deviant from the faith. “Infamy” was ascribed
to those who aided heretics. Anyone who protected a heretic was equally liable
to be excommunicated.
Gregory selected inquisitors from the new orders,
the Franciscans, founded in 1209, and the Dominicans, founded in 1220. Unlike
resident priests, the orders could devote themselves fully to the task. He particularly
felt the Dominicans were well trained in theology for the mission and task of
routing out heretics, and officially entrusted the Inquisition to them in 1233.
Gregory was a personal friend of Francis of
Assisi and felt the Franciscans lacked the worldly ambition that might tempt
the other, older orders in their pursuit of heretics. The Franciscans were officially appointed to the Inquisition
only in 1246. The austere lives of the Franciscans could be compared favorably
to the Catharists or Waldensians.
The friar inquisitors traveled around the countryside, admonishing
those who held heretical views to confess them. Their first tactic was preaching.
They believed that knowledge of the truth itself would guard local laypersons
from error.
Gregory’s explicit instructions to the
inquisitors were: When you arrive in a city, summon the bishops, clergy and
people, and preach a solemn sermon on faith; then select certain men of good
repute to help you in trying the heretics and suspects denounced before your
tribunal. All who on examination are found guilty or suspected of heresy must
promise to obey absolutely the commands of the church; if they refuse, you must
prosecute them, according to the statutes which we have recently promulgated.
The suspected persons were brought before a kind
of local jury that included the local priest and laypersons. Those accused by
witnesses were closely interrogated. One question they were asked was, “Have
you heard the heretics say, and have you believed that all the good spirits as
well as the souls of the angels and of men had been made originally by the good
god in heaven, and that there they had sinned and had fallen from heaven, and
that some of these spirits had become embodied in human bodies by the bad god?”
Another question was simply, “Did you, at this
time, believe that these heretics were good men and spoke the truth, that they
had a good faith and a good sect, in which men were able to be saved, and that
the doctrine which you heard from them was true, wholly or partially?” To that
question one French widow responded:
I, at the time, thought and believed that these heretics
were good people, in that they engaged in great abstinences, never took
anything of others, did not render evil for evil, also because they observed
chastity. But now I do not hold them to be good people, but on the contrary to
be evil, for they are very grasping and selfish, and also because they force
people to die “the endura.” But all the doctrines exposed above, all their
errors, I believed to be the truth, pressured as I was to believe it. And I
remained in this belief for about a year, until they told me not to suckle my daughter,
after her heretication, and also because at that time I heard them tell their
“believers” to kill those who persecuted them, betrayed them, or denounced them,
“for it is necessary to cut down the bad tree” [Matthew 7:19]. That is why,
since that time, I no longer believed their doctrine to be true, but rather that
they were evil people. I provided for them since that time in my house, because
I was afraid of them and I loved my husband very much, and I did not wish to
offend him. I had observed him to be very attached to these heretics.
There were various ways the inquisitors hoped to establish
the truth. They hoped for confessions. The ones who voluntarily confessed to
heresy were offered lighter penalties—fasting, the wearing of a yellow cross,
fines, or a pilgrimage, for instance. At the same time, they were asked for the
names of other heretics.
Eyewitnesses were called. Those who were
obstinate in the face of several witnesses were imprisoned. Heavy penalties
included flagellation, the confiscation of goods, imprisonment, and ultimately
surrender to the state—which usually meant death by burning. In Germany
especially, trials sometimes resorted to “ordeals,” for divine intervention to
determine the guilt or innocence of a person. One such method was trial by hot
water. A person would draw a stone from the bottom of a boiling pot. His arm
then was bandaged. If, after three days, the hand was whole, the person was
acquitted.
But it soon became apparent that abuses of the Inquisition
system were common. One zealous Dominican inquisitor in France brought 180
persons to death by burning in 1239. The pope, when he heard of it, thought
this excessive and had the inquisitor imprisoned for life in a monastery. In
Toulouse, between 1245 and 1246, 945 people out of a population of about 5,000
were interrogated. One hundred and five were sentenced to prison, and the remainder
to lesser punishments.
In certain localities, inquisitors were
themselves placed in danger by townspeople. As the Inquisition progressed,
local inquisitors sent questions and problematic issues back to Rome for
decision. Appeals of sentences to the pope became common.
In 1244 the inquisitor’s role was more fully circumscribed,
and the Council of Narbonne stipulated
that the orders should receive no monetary benefit from the
Inquisitions, listed various categories of heretics, and declared, “It is
better for the guilty to remain unpunished than for the innocent to be punished.”
Manuals for inquisitors began to circulate. However,
in 1252 Pope Innocent IV sanctioned the use of torture to induce confessions,
and increasingly the pope restored power and authority to the inquisitors.
This strengthened and centralized the control of
the pope over the church and set precedents in church law. The Inquisition
indicated the extent to which the church would go to enforce conformity, not
only to its doctrines, but to its authority.
As a result of the church’s aggressive actions
against them, by 1400 few traces of the Catharist heretics remained. However,
in spite of the Inquisition and persecution, the Waldensians thrived,
especially among the lower classes. They influenced the Hussite movement in
Bohemia. Even without any central leadership, they survived to embrace the
Reformation, but found the reformed churches equally as intolerant of them as
the medieval church had been.
The Catholic Church in
China and Mongol Empire
Refer to Resource 11-7 in the Student Guide.
Christian influence reached into the heart of the
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Emissaries and
letters went back and forth between Christian leaders in Europe and Mongol Khans;
Nestorians already were prominent in the inner circles; and wives and mothers
of Mongol leaders were Christians. There was an opportunity for Christians to unite
with Mongols against Muslims in the Middle East. It seemed, in fact, that there
were opportunities for the Christian conversion of Mongol leaders themselves, who
had extended their empire far beyond the borders of any empire before or since
in world history.
The Mongols were a nomadic people emanating from Central
Asia. Genghis Khan (1162-1227) unified Mongol tribes and allied himself with
others, including the Keraits, who had been converted to Christianity in the
10th century by Nestorians. The Mongols captured Beijing in 1215. Genghis
warred against the Muslim Khorezin empire in southwestern Asia in the same decade
and conquered Tibet in the 1220s. The Mongol armies terrorized people
everywhere, evidencing military might and strategy characterized by a rapid movement
of cavalry.
Religiously, the Mongols were Shamanist, but they
realized these beliefs were insufficient for a state religion. Although many
leaders adopted Tibetan Lamaism, a form of Mahayana Buddhism, by policy they
were tolerant of all religions. Nestorian priests attended to the royal court
along with Buddhist monks and Muslims. In Genghis’s capital, Karakorum, mosques,
temples, and churches could be found alongside each other.
Europeans were confused as to where the Mongol invaders
originated from when they rode out of the east in the 1220s to wreak havoc upon
Eastern Europe. They captured Kiev, by then a center of Eastern Orthodoxy, in
1240; and the next year attacked Hungary, Poland, and Prussia.
They defeated the Teutonic Knights and Templars,
the finest European military forces. This brought greater urgency to the
European rulers. But Europe was divided politically. The Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick would not take a united front with the pope, who called for a Crusade
against the Mongols, and so no force was mobilized. Throughout Europe,
Christians prayed they would be saved from the Mongol onslaught. It began to seem
all Christendom would fall unless God intervened. Suddenly the Mongols turned
back. Perhaps God had intervened. Actually, Second Supreme Khan, Ogedai, had
died, and Mongol princes and generals hastened back to the capital. But
Europeans wondered when the Mongols would return, and shuddered.
In 1245, Pope Innocent IV sent two Franciscans
with letters for the “Emperor of the Tartars.” Friar John of Plano Carpini
arrived in Karakorum in 1246, in time for the coronation of Genghis’s grandson,
the Third Supreme Khan, Kuyuk.
The first letter was largely theological,
describing the redemptive and mediatory work of Christ. The pope said he was
sending the friars to fulfill the apostolic mission of the church, “so that
following their salutary instructions you may acknowledge Jesus Christ the very
Son of God and worship His glorious name by practicing the Christian religion.”
From your reading of the first letter, what was
your impression of its message?
The second letter of the pope, written a week
later, was more confrontational. It spoke against the Mongol invasion and destruction
and “earnestly beseeched” the Khan to offer penance to God, who “without doubt
you have seriously aroused by such provocation.” God may be refraining from
chastising the proud for a season, the pope warned, but He may “take greater
vengeance in the world to come.”
How would you expect someone to receive and respond
to this second letter?
The Khan’s response began by calling upon the
pope to come with the other princes to serve him. He called the pope’s words
impudent. So far as the Khan was concerned, the Mongols were carrying out God’s
commands. “How could anybody seize or kill by his own power contrary to the
command of God?” the Khan asked. He had his own theology: “From the rising of
the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could
do this contrary to the command of God?” The Khan sent his warning: unless the
pope himself came to pay homage, he would be considered an enemy.
What is your impression of the Khan’s response? How
would you expect the pope to receive it?
Despite these recriminations, Kuyuk did favor Christianity
of all the religions in his empire. His mother was a Christian, at least in
name (both she and her son lived profligately). Kuyuk ruled only two years. But
before dying of alcohol poisoning, he was baptized.
Refer to Resource 11-8 in the Student Guide.
Meanwhile both the Europeans and the Mongols were
directing their attention to the Holy Lands. France’s King Louis IX in 1248
received ambassadors from the Mongol commander, Eljigedei, who himself had
been baptized a Christian, suggesting an
alliance between the Europeans and the Mongols against the Muslims. Louis
informed the pope, who promptly sent another mission to Karakorum led by Friar
Andrew. But by the time Andrew reached the Khan, in 1250, the empire was under
the regency of Kuyuk’s widow, Oghui- Ghaimish, who saw no reason to form an
alliance with the Europeans.
Louis sent another emissary, Friar William of
Rubruck. William traveled from Acre, the remaining Christian outpost in the
Holy Lands, to the Mongol ruler in Russia, Sartak, who was a Christian. Sartak
sent William and his companions on to the Great Khan Mangku in Karakorum.
The friar arrived in 1253. Mangku’s mother had
been a Christian, but he believed he needed to remain impartial toward any
religion. William had the opportunity to explain and defend the faith, but his theology
was, as historian James Chambers describes it, “intolerant and dogmatic and his
arguments were academic and philosophical.” His only “conversions” were a
Nestorian priest and six German children.
The Mongols continued to amass armies to face the
Muslims and attacked Baghdad in 1258. Not only were Christians included among
the Mongol soldiers, but the Mongol commander placed Christians in prominent positions
in Syria, which now came under Mongol control. Just when the Mongols were
preparing their advance against Muslims in Jerusalem, Mangku died and the
Mongol commander withdrew. This spared the destruction and possible
annihilation of Islam.
Mongols saw Europeans as their natural allies
against the Muslims and sent various representatives, mostly Nestorian
Christians, to European courts in the 1270s and 1280s. In 1288 and 1290 Argur,
Ilkhan of Persia, sent letters to the pope and the king of France, proposing a
joint effort in 1291 to drive the Muslims out of Palestine. The Khan had his
son baptized as a Christian and promised he himself would be baptized in the
River Jordan, and would restore Jerusalem to the Christians, if the alliance
achieved its goal.
But remarkably, neither the pope nor the European
princes seemed interested in this project. Their last Crusade efforts had
failed miserably, and they were unwilling to cooperate on another. Soon Argur
died and his son, who had been baptized a Christian, converted to Islam. By
this time the Mongols of the “Golden Horde” who ruled Russia also had become
Muslim. Any chance for a Christian/Mongol alliance in the Middle East against
the Muslims was lost forever.
In context the Christian response seemed
rational. The Europeans were terror-stricken by the Mongols. In spite of their
desire to retake the Holy Land, they realized the attainments of medieval
Islamic civilization surpassed their own. Muslim philosophy and architecture
were arguably the most advanced in the world in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Why embrace a barbarian horde and turn against these civilized
neighbors?
There were still opportunities waiting for
Christianity in eastern Asia, nonetheless. The Fifth Supreme Khan, Kublai,
directed his attention to China and particularly aimed at pacifying the south.
He had no preferences toward Chinese religions or learning, and used foreigners,
such as the Italian explorer Marco Polo, as well as Mongolians to govern the
subjected Chinese. Kublai Khan even invited the pope to send a hundred missionaries
to evangelize China! They did not come— they were not sent—and so Buddhist
lamas filled the religious void. Apparently Kublai himself embraced Buddhism.
The pope did send John of Monte Corvino, who
arrived just after Kublai’s death in 1294. John was able to establish an active
Christian center in the Khanbalik, the heart of the eastern Mongol empire. The
Pope appointed John as archbishop in 1307 and sent additional missionaries.
John wrote to the pope from Beijing in January 1305 regarding his mission and
the conditions of the church in China:
In the year of our Lord 1291, I, Brother John of Monte
Corvino, of the Order of Friars Minor, left the city of Tauris, in Persia, and
penetrated into India. For thirteen months I sojourned in that country and in the church of the Apostle St. Thomas,
here and there, and baptized about a hundred people . . . Resuming my journey,
I arrived at Cathay, the kingdom of the emperor of the Tartars, who is called
the great Khan. In delivering to the said emperor the letters of the Lord Pope,
I preached to him the law of our Lord Jesus Christ. The emperor is too rooted
in his idolatry, but he is full of good will to Christians. And I have been
twelve years with him.
Isolated in this distant pilgrimage, I was eleven
years without making my confession until the arrival of Brother Arnold, a
German from the province of Cologne, who has been here for two years.
In the city of Khanbalik I built a church which
has been finished six years. I added a campanile with three bells. I have
baptized, I think, almost six thousand people in the church, and had there not been
the campaign of calumny of which I spoke earlier, I would have baptized more
than thirty thousand. I am often busy administering baptism. I have also
bought, one by one, forty children of pagans below seven and twelve years of
age. As yet they know no faith: I have baptized them and educated them in Latin
letters and in our worship.
Through me, a king in this region, of the sect of
Nestorian Christians, who was of the race of that great king called Prester
John of India, adopted the true faith; he received minor orders and robed in consecrated
vestments, served me at mass. The Nestorians even accused him of apostasy; nevertheless,
he brought the majority of his people to the Catholic faih. He built a fine
church, worthy of his royal munificence.
I beg you, brothers whom this letter may reach,
to have a care that its content comes to the knowledge of the Lord Pope, the
cardinals, and the Procurator of our Order at the Roman court. Of our Minister-General
I ask alms of an antiphonary and readings from the lives of the saints, a
gradual and a psalter to serve as a model for us, since here I have only a
portable breviary and a small missal. If I have a model, the children will copy
it.
At present I am in process of building a new
church so that the children can be distributed in several areas. I am getting
old and my hair is quite white, less from age—I am only fifty-eight years
old–than from weariness and care. I have learned the Tartar language and script
reasonably well; that is, the language customarily used by the Mongols. I have translated
the whole of the New Testament and the Psalter into this language. I had it
transcribed in superb calligraphy and I show it. I read it, I preach it, and I
make it known publicly as a testimony to the law of Christ.
And I had made an agreement with King George, mentioned below, had he
lived, to translate the whole of the Latin office, so that it could be sung through
all the territories of his state; during his lifetime the Latin rite was
celebrated in his church in the language and scripture of his country, both the
words of the canon and the prefaces.
In response to this letter, Pope Clement V sent
several bishops to China to consecrate John of Monte Corvino as archbishop. The
pope also installed a bishop at Ts’iuan-Tcheou in south China. For sixty years
Catholic missionaries established churches throughout southern China.
However it seems likely that the churches were
made up mostly of the ruling peoples, the Mongols, and foreigners. So when,
inevitably, the Chinese rebelled against the Mongols, they also rejected the
religions associated with them.
Chu Yuan-Chang defeated the Mongols in 1368, established
the Ming dynasty, and returned Confucianism to its central place in Chinese
society. As the Nestorian churches had been virtually all destroyed with the
spread of antiforeignism in the tenth century, now in the fourteenth
Christianity again suffered near if not total collapse.
The story of Christian contacts with the Mongols
brings a whole series of intriguing “what if” questions, revolving around the
seemingly unlimited opportunities opened to Christians to spread the faith
throughout the empire, which spread from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan.
What if the pope’s admonitions in 1245 had been
more winsome and intelligible to Kuyuk, who after all, became a Christian?
What if the European princes had met the Ilkahn
in 1291 at the River Jordan to rout the Muslims out of the Holy Lands?
What if the pope had sent a large contingent of missionaries
in 1294 to evangelize China, and what if their efforts had been directed to the
masses rather than to the ruling elite?
The only answer to these questions is that the
history of the world, and the shape and form of Christianity today would be
different.
The opportunities were lost because of the
Christians’ fear of the unknown, their incapacity to believe God could be in a
murderous horde of devastation-bearing nomads. Opportunities were lost because
of the Christians’ bickering and divisions.
The popes failed to inspire the confidence of the
princes toward some great mission to the Mongols. The Mongols, it seemed, were
looking for what Christianity offered, a great religion that could unify their
empire from East to West. If Christians had been able to step into the void . .
. only if.
Write in your journal. Reflect on and respond to
the following:
AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS, READING 11CHAPTER XII
28. Now when deep reflection had drawn up out of
the secret depths of my soul all my misery and had heaped it up before the
sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, accompanied by a mighty rain of
tears. That I might give way fully to my tears and lamentations, I stole away
from Alypius, for it seemed to me that solitude was more appropriate for the business
of weeping. I went far enough away that I could feel that even his presence was
no restraint upon me. This was the way I felt at the time, and he realized it.
I suppose I had said something before I started up and he noticed that the
sound of my voice was choked with weeping. And so he stayed alone, where we had
been sitting together, greatly astonished. I flung myself down under a fig
tree—how I know not—and gave free course to my tears. The streams of my eyes gushed
out an acceptable sacrifice to you. And, not indeed in these words, but to this
effect, I cried to you: “And you, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Wilt you
be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities.” For I
felt that I was still enthralled by them. I sent up these sorrowful cries: “How
long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not this very hour make
an end to my uncleanness?”
29. I was saying these things and weeping in the
most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or
a girl—I know not which—coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and
over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” Immediately I ceased
weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some
kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the
like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not
but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first
passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming
into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what
was read had been addressed to him, “Go and sell what you have and give it to
the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By
such an oracle he was soon forthwith converted to you. So I quickly returned to
the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s
book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read
the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not
in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts
thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the
sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty
and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.
Preparation for your final
class session--
Assignment to be done before class
A. Read: Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, chapters
23
Write a Big
Idea paragraph from your reading.
B. Read the following articles and give a one paragraph
answer to the question asked.
1. Ministry
and Worship in the Late Middle Ages
How
is pastoral care different now than in the Middle Ages?
2. The Struggle Within the
Church
Describe
a person who might be called a heretic in the church today.
3.Theology
Devotion and Reform.
How
did Thomas Aquinas change biblical interpretation?
C. Write in your journal. Reflect on and respond to the
following:
AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS, READING `11
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