Part 7. Christianity: Schisms, Reform and Divisions

The break between Latin and Greek Christendom is usually dated to one summer day in 1054, when papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. The sources in the library agree that the date stands…

Between the Gregorian reform of the 1070s and the Renaissance, the Roman see turned from a client of emperors into a sovereign power. It deposed kings, ran a continental legal system, held territory and raised armies. The library’s sources read…

The crusade was born where the two lines of the previous chapters met. A Byzantine emperor asked the West for help against the Seljuks, and a reforming papacy had recently claimed the right to decide which wars were holy. The…

Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries the eastern and western churches faced a run of movements that taught that the visible world was the work of an evil or lesser power, not of the good God. The Byzantine and…

The end of the Cathars (Chapter 61) left the Latin Church with a permanent machinery for detecting heresy. For nearly five centuries that machinery took several forms: the medieval papal Inquisition after 1231, the Spanish Inquisition set up at the…

Between the Black Death and the printing press, two university reformers raised most of the objections that Martin Luther would bring against Rome a century later. John Wycliffe of Oxford and Jan Hus of Prague attacked clerical wealth, the claims…

Few figures on the library’s shelves are drawn in such opposite colours as Martin Luther. To the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica he is the professor whose Theses struck “sledge-hammer blows” at the worst abuse of his age. To Monsignor Patrick O’Hare,…

The Lutheran settlement described in the previous chapter was only one current of the Reformation. Two others ran beside it. The Reformed churches of the Swiss city-republics, led first by Zwingli in Zurich and then by Calvin in Geneva, carried…

Within a generation of Luther, the Reformation had become a matter of state policy and of war. Kings decided the confession of their realms, confiscated church property, and fought one another and their own subjects for faith and for power…

Between the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545 and the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church defined itself twice: first against the Protestant Reformation, then against, or towards, the modern world. The…

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Orthodox world lost the imperial centre it had had for a thousand years. Moscow claimed the succession. The following centuries saw a church bound closely to the throne, a schism over ritual, a Petrine…

The magisterial Reformation put Scripture and doctrine in place of priest and sacrament. A second Protestant current then put experience in the place of doctrine. It runs from Puritanism and continental Pietism through Wesley’s and Whitefield’s revivals and the American…