Have you ever thought about the difference between the biblical Jesus who said that the meek will inherit the earth and the Christ in whose name the Crusaders warred against Muslims and Jews?
These examples are, of course, at the extremes of Christianity—Jesus’ love of the least-favored people versus triumphant soldiers who went to war with the cross on their flags. But the image of Christians conducting wars and inflicting pain still jars us, and it is impossible for Christians to approve of those who took over Jerusalem in 1099 and massacred Muslims and Jews in the process.
How did this transformation take place?
There were a number of factors. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (in 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica), it had secular powers it had never had as a persecuted religion. Emperors such as Theolonius I then persecuted both pagans and Christian heretics.
But historian James C. Russell offers what is to me a novel and gripping explanation of the warlike tendencies in his 1994 book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity. He argues that the Germanic tribes—Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, Saxons, and many others—profoundly changed Christianity.
These Germanic tribes, the “barbarians,” began encroaching on traditional Roman imperial lands beginning in the 300s CE. Some had peaceful relations with the Romans; the Romans let them live on imperial lands if they provided soldiers for the Roman army. However, the Germans at times also fought bitterly, besting the Romans in the battle of Adrianopole (in today’s western Turkey) in 380. In 410 CE, one group, the Visigoths, famously sacked Rome.
A Kinship-based Culture
Germanic tribes had a culture and religions stemming from early Indo-European ancestors. The tribes were pagan, extremely local, focused on kinship, and dependent on the other members of their tribe. They were the epitome of the economist F. A. von Hayek’s “small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved.”[1]
To Hayek, such groups depended on habits that protected the group against outsiders. These tribes honored their ancestors, local gods, and heroism in war. Their geographical boundaries were their religious boundaries. As Russell says, the barbarians had “an agricultural, pastoral, world-accepting folk society . . . deeply attuned to the cycles of nature.”[2]
In contrast, Christianity was a universal religion, open to all, but based on saving people from their sins. It had a “world-rejecting, individualist, and soteriological [salvation-based] world-view,” writes Russell. [3] It had a timeline of history based on God’s purposeful intervention from the Creation to the Last Judgment.
Russell says this “metaphysical disparity” reflected the urban vs. rural origins of the two groups:
“[Christianity’s] anomic [as in anomie, an anxiety-ridden social environment], heterogeneous, urban stage of a senescent classical civilization must be contrasted with the more cohesive, homogeneous, pastoral-warrior stage of a nascent Germanic culture.”[4]
Christian bishops and the pope tried to convert the Germans after the western empire collapsed in 476.[5] Conversion was a process that went on for centuries, although Russell focuses on the period from 476 to 800 (when Charlemagne became the Holy Roman Emperor).
Conversion Attempts
We see two kinds of efforts. One was political: the Romans (now Christian, of sorts) developed allies among the Franks, for example. The Frankish king Clovis I was baptized in 508, after being convinced that Christ had led him to victory. His people were expected to be Christians. They were not converted by the sword, however; German tribes tended to go along with the religion of their leader.
Second, Christian bishops tried to convert the barbarians individually by teaching the story of Christ’s salvation.
But the “metaphysical disparity” between Germans and Christians was too great for an easy transition—the Germans seemed content with their religion, not feeling in need of salvation.
Thus, missionary outreach included accommodation to existing beliefs and mores. Missionaries tried to imbue Germans’ traditional concepts with Christian meanings. One example: the name of the head of the comitatus, the important military caste of German society, was translated as dominus, a Latin word often used to mean Christ. Not a promising start for a religion built on the concept of loving one’s neighbor, including long-hated neighbors such as Samaritans.
Says Russell: “The worldly, magicoreligious, heroic, folk religiosity of the pre-Christian Germanic peoples was transferred from Odin, Tiwaz, Thor, and Freyja, and the shrines and amulets dedicated to them, to Christus Victor, his loyal saints, and their shrines and relics.”[6]
Praying to Christ for victory in war became a habit. Praying to saints for victory was natural, too. And Gregory I (the pope from 590 to 604) allowed missionaries to go along with Germans’ traditional sacrifices. He wrote to Abbot Mellitus: “And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.”[7]
Such accommodation was meant to be temporary, but there was little follow-through. “The general lack of post-baptismal religious instruction, complemented by the vitality of Germanic religiosity, resulted in the Germanization of Christianity,” says Russell. [8] He quotes Derek Baker as saying, “Europe may have seemed Christian in the year 1000, but it was only ‘the shadow of the Christian symbol’ which had been cast.”[9]
Russell believes that European Catholicism has retained some “magicoreligious” tendencies from the German religions. He points to “Masses offered at the shrines of saints for special intentions” as “formidable elements of contemporary Catholic religiosity”—resulting from Germanic traditions.[9]
Russell, who carefully threads his way through the works of many theologians and historians to make his case, argues for a purer Christianity that reflects the “soteriological and eschatological mysteries of the Redemption” rather than religiously-inspired military victory. [11] He thinks that the seeds of such renewal began to appear with the Second Vatican Council in 1974, but have yet to flower.
The painting above is named “Peter the Hermit Preaching the First Crusade.” It is from Cassell’s History of England, via Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.
Notes (Comments follow the notes.)
[1] F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 11.
[2] James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York Oxford University Press, 1994), 176.
[3] Russell, 176.
[4] Russell, 98.
[5] This was the year that Odoacer, head of the Ostrogoths, exiled the young emperor Romulus Augustus, and took over Rome.
[6] Russell, 188.
[7] Quoted in Russell, 186.
[8] Russell, 7.
[9] Quoted by Russell, 210.
[10] Russell, 210–211.
[11] Russell, 210.
Minor factual correction: The battle of Adrianople was fought in 378, not 380.
The thesis may have some merit, but it is weakened by the fact that the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, whose Germanic element was minimal, also persecuted Jews—some of the punishments against Jews in Justinian’s compilation of Roman law (c. 533 CE) are horrific, although there is good reason to believe the persecution was not continuous.
I think that the unification of Christianity with the power of the state was the greater factor.