Was the medieval Church 'graceless'?
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
This is a spin-off from the thread about Luther's 'theology of the Cross'.
@Lamb Chopped commented on the 'grace-less' medieval Church.
Which set me thinking.
The late medieval Western Church comes in for a lot of stick. Corrupt Popes. Indulgences. All sorts of shenanigans.
But was it entirely 'grace-less' and is it possible for any Christian church to be entirely without grace?
I've heard very zealous Orthodox folk claim that the Holy Spirit left Western Christianity entirely at the Great Schism, a claim I find outrageous to be blunt.
A Romanian woman in our parish recommended I visit the 'Black Church' in Brasov but as it's an RC cathedral it's only a 'cultural monument'.
Yikes!
I think everyone agrees that late medieval Roman Catholicism had 'issues' - even the RCs themselves acknowledge as much as far as I am aware.
But as well as Chaucer's atrocious Pardoner and Summoner we get his 'pouvre parson of an town' and some indication that there were those who took their vocation seriously.
Any reforming or revivalist movement tends to place what preceded it in an unflattering light. The Methodists exaggerated the parlous state of the Church of England for instance, even though there were plenty of exceptions to the caricature of indolent clergy hobnobbing with the gentry.
From an Orthodox perspective late medieval Roman Catholicism was far too Scholastic and then ratcheted up its tendency to over-dogmatise everything as a reaction against the Protestant Reformation.
But how fair are some of these criticisms from both the Protestant and Orthodox sides?
We've got some of the great Catholic mystics from this period and some interesting religious movements and new monastic orders.
I don't think anyone would say it was 'all bad' - but what if anything, would Shipmates of whatever tradition or persuasion say were the redeeming features on the RC side from that period?
@Lamb Chopped commented on the 'grace-less' medieval Church.
Which set me thinking.
The late medieval Western Church comes in for a lot of stick. Corrupt Popes. Indulgences. All sorts of shenanigans.
But was it entirely 'grace-less' and is it possible for any Christian church to be entirely without grace?
I've heard very zealous Orthodox folk claim that the Holy Spirit left Western Christianity entirely at the Great Schism, a claim I find outrageous to be blunt.
A Romanian woman in our parish recommended I visit the 'Black Church' in Brasov but as it's an RC cathedral it's only a 'cultural monument'.
Yikes!
I think everyone agrees that late medieval Roman Catholicism had 'issues' - even the RCs themselves acknowledge as much as far as I am aware.
But as well as Chaucer's atrocious Pardoner and Summoner we get his 'pouvre parson of an town' and some indication that there were those who took their vocation seriously.
Any reforming or revivalist movement tends to place what preceded it in an unflattering light. The Methodists exaggerated the parlous state of the Church of England for instance, even though there were plenty of exceptions to the caricature of indolent clergy hobnobbing with the gentry.
From an Orthodox perspective late medieval Roman Catholicism was far too Scholastic and then ratcheted up its tendency to over-dogmatise everything as a reaction against the Protestant Reformation.
But how fair are some of these criticisms from both the Protestant and Orthodox sides?
We've got some of the great Catholic mystics from this period and some interesting religious movements and new monastic orders.
I don't think anyone would say it was 'all bad' - but what if anything, would Shipmates of whatever tradition or persuasion say were the redeeming features on the RC side from that period?
Comments
I suspect the mediaeval RC Church was far from moribund. After all Luther was a monk and had become one because of his zeal. I suspect there was much earnest seeking after truth in the pre-Reformation period. To draw a parallel, one would be most unwise to look at 1900 Wales or 2000 South Korea and conclude that the multiplicity of splinter groups were the result of their immediate predecessors being particularly lukewarm, lazy Christians.... isn't it more likely that the Reformation was driven by an earnest, zealous matrix than a lackadaisical one?
Hmm
Graceless stuff
Crusades, inquisitions, horrid and sometimes violent schism with the Orthodox, persecution of early Protestant movements, priestly and monkish impropriety, indulgences …
I’m sure there was grace. There was Julian of Norwich, Thomas a Kempis. In the early Middle Ages there was St Columba, St Aidan. Then of course St Francis.
A mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. All human life was there.
But I reckon @Lamb Chopped was thinking about the late medieval church, the Borgias, the Spanish Inquisition, Indulgences. Some pretty nasty stuff there.
It was built as a Roman Catholic church. When I visited some years ago our guide was Romanian Orthodox.
Julian of Norwich — whose theology of divine love is as grace-saturated as anything in the Christian tradition.
Thomas à Kempis — The Imitation of Christ is a devotional classic of humility and mercy.
St. Francis of Assisi — a living embodiment of evangelical poverty and compassion.
The Rhineland mystics — Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso.
Monastic reform movements — Cluniac, Cistercian, and later Observant reforms
And it still extended the sacraments.
While there were problems in the higher echelons of the church. most medieval Christians experienced a pastorally decent, even warm, parish church.
Christ remained present in Word and Sacrament even when the ministers fail.
I did say in the OP that 'I don't think anyone is saying that it was all bad.'
Anyone includes you.
That said, I should perhaps have made it clearer that I wasn't taking your comment in an entirely literal sense.
@Barnabas62 the Orthodox recognise pre-Schism Saints such as St Aidan and St Columba. My parish church is full of icons of British and Irish Saints as well as Russian, Greek, Romanian and all sorts of other Saints including the martyrs of the Boxer Rebellion.
You'll often here Orthodox people say, 'Britain was Orthodox before the Schism ...'
Well yes, in that the terms 'Orthodox' and 'Catholic' were co-terminous at that time.
There are even some zealots who portray the Battle of Hastings as an Orthodox vs Roman Catholic confrontation.
Which is stretching it a bit, although it's true that the Pope backed the Normans to bring this country more closely into his orbit.
From an Orthodox point of view 1066 was a disaster with worse to come.
All that said, I think most less swivel-eyed or beardy-weirdy Orthodox would approve of the list @Gramps49 has provided, with some caveats here and there.
St Francis of Assissi would be seen as ok, apart from the stigmata and later developments in Franciscan theology, for instance.
I'm happy to venerate post-Schism Saints and even Protestant figures who wouldn't accept the Big S designation. 'Holy John Wesley, pray for us.'
@TurquoiseTastic it was a Romanian who told me the 'Black Church' was RC. I've found they can't always distinguish RC churches from Protestant ones.
Heck, at a very wonderful concert of Byzantine chant in Shrewsbury's RC cathedral a Romanian chap from our parish asked if it was a Protestant church. It didn't fit his cultural assumptions of what an RC one should look like, he found it rather 'plain' and unadorned.
Whereas to me it was pretty obvious it was an RC place of worship.
I think @Alan29 is right that myths have been debunked but there's a long way to go at the 'popular' level I think.
There are plenty of Orthodox who think that nothing of any value happened in 'the West' after 1054, and although most Protestants would accept that not everything was bad pre-1517, they will still tend to assess most early medieval or later medieval stuff using Protestant criteria.
We all judge according to our own traditions and standards.
But there will be those who 'speak' to all of us, right across the spectrum. @Gramps49 has identified some of them. There will be others of course.
But, @Alan29, regardless of the current situation and the room for individual conscience with Catholicism, wasn’t Catholicism historically pretty “top down”?
They can be dominated by a handful of key individuals or families rather than a distant Magisterium or Patriarchate.
That was certainly the case in Pentecostalism and among some Brethren assemblies.
Within the historic Churches there's always been a tension between hierarchical structures and maverick holy fools, eccentrics and 'prophetic' types. This can be a creative tension or it can be a debilitating one according to context and a range of factors.
I think what we see on a micro level within independent and congregational style churches has echoes and parallels at a macro level within the historic Churches - and vice versa.
There have been plenty of mini-Protestant Popes.
John Wesley wasn't nick-named 'Pope John' for nothing.
Some of the restorationist 'house church' leaders would have made some Popes look positively democratic and collegial.
Heck, I'd happily have Pope Leo or Pope Francis any day of the week ...
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the failings at the top were spread down, and that's the focus of the thread. But in general there was more variety in Liturgy and how bishops were appointed for example than nowadays.
Sometimes grace is indeed demonstrated top-down, sometimes bottom-up. It is still grace. The wind of the Spirit blows where it will.
I totally agree.
Incidentally, I am very keen to avoid exploiting divisions between churches or styles of governance or even historical periods. I have experienced some extremely grace obstructing people at the local level both lay and clerical and across churches and indeed faiths. It's part of the human condition.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/jack-chick-christian-comic-cartoonist-death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Chick
He was also an ardent Dispensationalist.
I gained a good overview of the scriptures from him but left the rest to one side.
My gut feeling is that this thread has come from a similar emotional place (salted with a lack of knowledge of historical research over the last couple of decades) hence my discomfort with it.
FWIW I once read something about certain periods within the Russian Orthodox Church when it was observed that it was remarkable that any genuine spiritual life survived at all.
The older Brethren guy I mentioned didn't reflect the views of the younger members of his assembly - or even some who had RC neighbours and got on so well that they went on family holidays together.
I’m now imagining a Danny Kaye comedy movie called The Vicar General…
This was also my experience in the several lovely Brethren churches I was part of 50-60 years ago.
Have you read Edmund Gosse' 'Father and Son', a wonderful evocation of those gatherings in Victorian times?
Now, Mrs RR and I (still evans both) follow the Jesuit website 'Sacred Space' every morning and take part in their retreats. Grace abounds, PTL!
I suppose the words “Open” and “Exclusive” do come to mind?
And of course Brethren is pretty sexist. What about Sistern?
My local congregation moved to Brethren and Sistern leadership and teaching over 30 years ago. I think it heard what the Spirit was saying to the church. At any rate it was open to change. And is much healthier for it.
I didn't knock around with the Brethren for very long. I used to roll my eyes at the whacky takes on the Book of Revelation at the 6.30pm 'Gospel Meetings'.
I kept going to the midweek Bible studies though. There was a lot of Brethren influence on the UK restorationist scene too, of course, particularly in the part I was involved with. Perhaps the most stable element looking back.
But we are drifting from the OP ...
Although God's ways are not ours and vice versa, it is quite difficult to equate the God who is merciful and who abounds in steadfast love with refusing to have anything to do with anybody except for those special few who just happen to be in communion X, whether communion X is centred on Rome, Constantinople, the Brethren Assembly, London Road, Wigan or the First Pentecostal Assembly of God of Dayton, Ohio.
That also doesn't seem to fit with how I understand Incarnation. If God the Son has been prepared to become incarnate as a human baby in a grubby little Middle Eastern town and spend three years with twelve disciples and a rabble of other followers who consistently demonstrate that they do not understand what he is saying or what the implications are of who he is, I think one has to assume that he is not as obsessed with people getting everything right first time, or even the next time or the time after that. Or, to summarise, God is generous and his grace, his loving kindness is big, wide and not constrained by the constraints ecclesiastics and dogmatists have been so determined to impoise on him.
That may be heresy and who am I anyway, but it's what I think.
Neither Rome nor Constantinople (or even Moscow) restricts the possibility of salvation to adherents of their own particular orbit these days, nor any but the most sectarian of sectarian sects.
Heck, medieval depictions of the Last Judgement in both Western and Eastern Christianity show Popes, Patriarch, bishops, clergy, monks and nuns among both the saved and the damned.
The moderate Puritan Richard Baxter believed that many RCs were 'blessed souls with Christ.'
I remember reading that a prominent RC cleric was convinced the Anglican Bishop of Lincoln was among the redeemed at a time when the official Papal position might cast doubt on that possibility.
I don't think I've ever encountered any 'mainstream' Brethren or Pentecostals who believed their group were the only ones who'd be saved, so I'm not sure where @Enoch's observation is coming from.
I've met some hard-line people in my time but very few who'd go so far as to make such a claim and they certainly weren't representative of their group as a whole.
Amen.
It really is unwise to second-guess God. Particularly when talking about someone’s eternal future.
I’ve never been sure about the motivations of those who do. Sometimes they’ve been taught it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes they believe it’s a kind of duty of care.
But whatever. We sing a hymn with the line “For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.” That’s always been more than enough for me.
Plenty of Popes and other heirarchs have done so in the past but these days it tends to be the fundie fringe of particular traditions that do so.
A recurring problem in many of these threads is a failure to define terms.
Not a complete definition but a quote comes to mind.
“A church where it seemed like everything was forbidden unless it was compulsory”
Maybe the single hyphenated word “self-righteous”?
Earlier in that same thread, Lamb Chopped said:
Lamb Chopped can say if I’m reading her incorrectly, and if I am I hope she will say so, but in context I took her mean the view of Luther and other Reformers that the theology and practices of the Catholic Church of their time placed far too much emphasis on the role of works in salvation and far too little, if any, on the role of grace. Luther and other Reformers thought all of the emphasis should be on grace.
So I read the comment that Luther felt “called to try to heal the graceless-ness of the medieval church” as a comment on Luther’s view of the medieval church’s soteriology, not on a lack of grace evident in the lives and actions of Christians, or even in the medieval church itself.
It's why I was so cranky about this thread getting started off my remark. I was never saying that the medieval Roman Catholic church, or any Christian church, was completely lacking in grace. That would be to say that they were not Christian, were not a church at all.
I believe that God does at times raise up people to turn the church (all his churches!) away from particular difficulties they have fallen into, and back to him. In Luther's day, the primary screaming need was a return to God's grace, remembering that human works don't accomplish salvation. That's what Luther was on about. We may criticize the way he did it, or the fact that he did not do any number of other things we think he ought to have done; but then, we can do that sort of critique for every other figure in Christian history. I don't think it's very worthwhile, most of the time. Better to learn from them what we can, and then try to be useful to the church in our own day, as they were.
Actually the domination does happen but is dependent on very different power structures, not better ones, different ones. These include personal charisma and the now almost extinct family standing. Changes in society have made it so except in either very rural communities or in very poor you are no longer X's son or daughter as an adult. When a family is only one generation within a congregation then it is personal charisma again.
I have come across some people in various Christian traditions- including my own - who seemed to think that the medieval Western Church was completely lacking in grace all together.
I wasn't insinuating that you were saying the same @Lamb Chopped but your comment did seem uncharacteristically sweeping and of a kind that might have got me into trouble if I'd made it.
But then I'm perfectly capable of getting myself into trouble ...
That said, I was simply using your comment as a springboard to explore aspects of late medieval Western Christianity whether good, bad or indifferent.
From interaction with you here I'm aware that you wouldn't adopt an 'everything was knackered until Luther came along to fix it,' approach although clearly you are bound to see Brother Martin as a seminal figure and I'm not detracting from that.
I cross-posted with you on this one.
Yes, I wasn't making out that the various models were 'better' - we wouldn't have to look far to find a Congregationalist minister or office-holder who might be 'better' at their role than an Orthodox or RC bishop, priest or deacon or an Anglican clergy person or ...
Obviously I'd plump for episcopal structures on the grounds of Tradition and succession but just because someone is in the 'right' line of succession in Big T terms doesn't mean they can't be a bozo.
My point was that no particular structure or way of organising church is immune from dominant or overweening individuals or groups.
Despite the scandal I still like What’s so Amazing about Grace. And the term ungrace (rather than graceless) is basically a behavioural criticism.
But on Lamb Chopped’s excellent point, I think the fresh emphasis on saved by grace was very important.
I’m not saying it wasn’t in medieval Catholicism but Luther underlined it.
It's significant that the trigger for Luther's theses was the whole Indulgences thing - although there was more to it than that.
That doesn't mean that the concept of grace was unknown, but there's a whole system of 'merits' and 'demerits', Masses for the dead etc etc.
The Orthodox can get on their high-horse at times and say, 'Ha! We never went in for Imdulgences, chantry chapels and private Masses ...' But there were certainly instances of similar practices from time to time. In which case we'll say, 'Ah, well that just goes to show. Don't be too hasty to adopt Western practices ...' 😉
The correspondence between Melanchthon and Patriarch Jeremias II might be something for another thread.
It went from something like, 'That's interesting, learned Germans. You've given the Pope what's for. Perhaps you'd like to join us? You'd be very welcome. Come on in, the water's lovely ...'
To:
'Hey, steady on. Hang on a minute ... don't call us, we'll call you.'
The Patriarch's put-down has to be one of the most passive-aggressive brush-offs in history.
Effectively, 'Please don't write to us again on these matters but only in a spirit of fraternal greetings and concern.'
From an Orthodox perspective the Reformers were going too far in some ways - the 'solas' essentially - and not far enough in others. They all retained the 'filioque clause'.
There was also the concern that Western Christianity had effectively turned grace into a commodity rather than it being 'uncreated' and an expression of God's very being. Although I'm not sure whether they thought the Reformers retained that kind of view.
It's all a bit complicated and above my pay grade.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since and from what I can gather there's been fruitful Lutheran/RC and fruitful Lutheran/Orthodox dialogue in recent years.
I hope some of our hot-heads and zealots don't undermine that process.
There are some Russian and Romanian icons that were so embellished with silver mounts and frames that much of the surface was obscured. Only the subject's face and hands are showing.
I think a similar process happened in late medieval Scholasticism and some aspects were obscured.
Equally, there were/are times when Orthodoxy's light has been dimmed by egregious tendencies such as nationalism, phyltism and erastianism.
We can get a bit like Swift's A Tale Of A Tub where he saw Rome 'adding' and the more radical Reformers 'taking away' - only applying that trope to ourselves and not the Anglicans as Swift did.
Hence the Orthodox tending to regard the Lutherans, Anglicans and other Churches of the 'Magisterial Reformation' as closer in tone than those that arose from the radical Reformation.
That doesn't mean they don't recognise common ground with Baptists and so on. As a general rule of thumb, though, we'd tend to be more wary of things that emerged within Protestantism from the 1830s onwards.
But that's all by the by and getting away from the medieval scope of the OP.
Interestingly, perhaps, and this may be a topic for another thread, friends from an Orthodox parish in the south-west of England observed to me how 'transactional' many converts seem to be.
Do this, that or the other, pray this particular prayer or perform those particular ritual and ... kerching!
Result.
They have all on trying to demonstrate that it's relational rather than transactional.
Interesting conversations here in Romania with our guide who spent 10 years in the US and found the parishes there full of 'very neo-Protestant Protestants' as she described them. She was surprised to be invited to Bible studies which she found quite 'cheesy' in tone.
Whatever the tone, bring them on, I say ...
Interesting to visit some Lutheran churches here too and to hear about the German community that flourished here for 900 years.
But that's for the travel thread ...
Point taken. But the noun has some value.
You probably know this but just in case. C S Lewis was asked once what was unique about Christian belief. He’s reported to have said, “That’s easy. Grace”.
And in a very unlikely duet across time, Bono (lead singer of U2) said pretty much the same.
As I see it, 'grace' is not something that is imparted. It describes a quality of God's nature, how he is, what he is like, akin to his kindness and steadfast love. So to describe it as is saying something very important.
As such, I think the view @Gamma Gamaliel is questioning remains very much in the Reformed tradition, and particularly in neo-Calvinism, which adopts very similar theological processes of reasoning to those of neo-Thomism, but applies them differently.