What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (28 page)

This is not to say the Middle Ages were entirely dark. The ninth to the thirteenth centuries did produce ideas like the university, small industries driven by waterwheels, and advances in architecture that produced spectacular cathedrals. There were also scholarly investigations into nature.

But medieval logic proceeded from a different premise—a biblical premise—and this only got you so far. Every object and event now had a theological meaning; every stone and blade of grass was put here to drive home some moral point. Creation was an instruction book written by God for man to read and for the clergy to interpret. Everything from the weather to the behavior of field mice had a Christian message. Life was a testing ground for admission to what was really important—the afterlife. Our time on earth was essentially a moral obstacle course, and there were plenty of experts on heaven, hell, God, and the devil, to tutor you on how to maximize your chances for eternal bliss. Usually it meant doing what you were told.

Back then, the cosmos was a relatively cozy place. Earth was nestled at the center, the planets orbited in perfect circles, and God looked on from beyond the sphere of the stars. Man was caught in the frontier between hell below and heaven above. The world was the battleground between the two, with God nearby to help with the odd miracle now and then, and the promise of eternal life at the end of it all. Everything had a purpose and a place.

In those days there was a comforting certainty about life, death, good and evil, that we don’t have now. Some folks are nostalgic for those days, buying into the premise that certainty about something,
anything
, is better than none at all. They bemoan today’s “moral relativism” and obsess over post-modern daydreamers who claim there is no such thing as right and wrong.

Outside of a few academic circles, however, most of us don’t subscribe to this. We
do
believe in right and wrong. But we also have questions and doubts, and doubt is constructive. Doubt is something grownups deal with. Doubt is what makes you think and reflect, and that’s a good thing. Is this going out on a limb?

What’s more, the claim that belief in God provides a moral anchor in the stormy seas of societal change is fiction. “God” is as subjective and evolving an idea as any. Quiz your church on moral issues today and you’ll get answers very different from the ones you got back in the 14
^th
century. Eternal truth isn’t so eternal.

Anyway, the Middle Ages are such a long and complicated era of history that the details are far beyond what we can handle here. But we should touch on a few highlights to understand the, ahem, benefits of a religion-based civilization.

A Thousand Years in a Thousand Words

Rome fell.

Okay, maybe that’s a little too simple. Actually, one could argue that Rome never fell at all; it cleaved into other, smaller entities that carried on. Let’s flesh this out a little.

Back in 330, Emperor Constantine moved the Roman capital to the newly rebuilt city of Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople (now Istanbul) after the emperor’s death. The Empire became politically divided. Constantinople became the capital of the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Empire, while the capital of the western, Latin-speaking Empire remained in Rome.

The Byzantine east continued to flourish. But by A.D. 476, the Latin west was overrun by barbarian kings and military brutes. Once these flea-bitten monarchs set up their kingdoms on the ruins of Rome, they tried to class up their act. If the Bishop of Rome would anoint them, they’d have God’s blessing and the people might think of them as legitimate rulers instead of victorious gangsters. Popes like Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, were happy to leverage the papacy into a Holy-Stamp-of-Approval for these kings in exchange for money, land, slaves, or protection. God was now open for business.

To be sure, Christianity sought to push back against much of the cruelty of the ancient world. But in the process, Gregory and his team grew powerful and rich. The great palaces of classical Rome were disassembled and their parts cannibalized to build new digs for the Church. To polish up his own rep, Greg wrote a whitewashed history of Catholicism and argued for the supremacy of the papacy—that is, himself—over all other bishops.

A devotee of Augustine, he also pushed hard on the controversial Trinity theory of God, which the eastern churches didn’t like so much. This contributed to the already growing split between the eastern and western halves of the Empire.

While all this was going on, a new actor appeared on the stage in the early 600s and proceeded to hog the spotlight. Islam stormed out of Arabia and, by the year 1000, had swept across most the Mediterranean. It spread largely through conquest (not the first religion to do this), and it built the most sophisticated civilization of its day. The Arabs copied and studied the Greek classics. There was lighting in the streets of Cairo. There were scientific advances in medicine, optics, and astronomy. Words like
algebra, alchemy, zenith, zero
, and
algorithm
, not to mention our system of numbers, all came out of this period of Arabic enlightenment. They constructed magnificent mosques—architectural marvels the equal of any Gothic cathedral, which wouldn’t appear for another three centuries. All this went on while Christians were hunkered down in grimy villages fearing demons and looking for signs of the Apocalypse. What a difference a millennium makes, huh?

Christianity continued to fear its own shadow and, beginning in 726, in an effort to raise public morality, the Byzantine emperor issued a series edicts that banned worship of images and artworks, even if that meant destroying them. They were idolatry, you see, and violated the commandment against making graven images.

To its credit, the western Church (and many eastern ones) rejected this idea. Using images for worship was an ancient custom, and few wanted to take a hammer to perfectly good works. This issue would be an early contribution to what eventually became a formal schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox (“right believing”) faith.

The Roman papacy allied itself with various western rulers, like King Pepin, who granted the Church large territories in the mid-700s. The pope became a feudal landlord, with all the lucrative benefits therein. (And in 800, he was nice enough to crown Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire). The land grants helped establish several small papal states in Italy. The office took on the trappings of royalty. At one point, the Church controlled as much as one-fifth of the wealth of England.

With all this going for it, the papacy became a career goal for ambitious Italian aristocrats, few of whom were interested in emulating Christ. The office devolved into a license to steal, and was hijacked by a sorry succession of criminals who were greedy, vain, and occasionally unhinged.

In 896, the vengeful Pope Stephen VII actually put the dead body of his predecessor on trial. The late Pope Formosus was from a rival family clan. His corpse had been in its tomb for eight months when Stephen had it hauled into a courtroom, dressed in priestly robes, and perched upon a throne. Stephen then railed against it, and Formosus was posthumously condemned. Three of the body’s fingers were cut off before it was thrown to an angry mob, then dumped into the Tiber River. Not surprisingly, the local Romans decided that Pope Stephen was crazy as a mad cow and, a few months later, he was strangled to death.

Over the next seven years, half a dozen short-lived popes took assumed power and usually ended up dead. Finally, a controversial ally of Stephen named Sergius managed to keep the job for seven years. This set up one of the darkest periods in the history of the Church—a period later nicknamed the “Pornocracy.” You’re gonna like this.

Pope Joan

By A.D. 900, the city of Rome was a small, creaky relic of its former self. It was led by a rather spineless ruler named Theophylact, who indulged his beautiful, power-mad wife—Theodora—to the point where she essentially ran the city. The woman was a pistol.

First, she secured her clout with the reigning Pope Sergius by pimping out her young daughter, Marozia, to be his mistress. Being good Catholics, the two lovers avoided birth control and the affair produced a son named John.

Next, after Pope Sergius died in 911, Theodora used her wiles to get her own lover, Bishop John of Ravenna, elevated to the papacy. She was now screwing Pope John X.

Then, with the previous pope dead and Marozia still in her teens, mom married her off to a powerful solider of fortune named Alberic. Marozia gave birth to a second son, Alberic II. They must have been up all night with the baby name books.

In the following years, Rome was consumed with fending off invading Huns from the north and the Muslim armies from the south. During this period, Theophylact, Theodora, and Alberic all disappear from the historical record.

But not Marozia, who turned out to be a more ambitious operator than her mother. She wanted a pope in the family—namely her first son, John. But she had to get rid of the current pope, her mother’s old lover, John X. This wasn’t going to be easy because he had allied himself with a warrior named Hugh of Provence, whom John X had named king of Italy in exchange for protection.

So, Marozia seduced and married Hugh’s half-brother, Guy, who happened to have his own army. It took a few years but, in 928, Marozia managed to have John X thrown into a Roman dungeon, where he died a year later. Three years after that, Marozia’s twenty-something son became the next pope. From a pope’s lover to a pope’s mother. Pretty good. But she wasn’t through.

With her son now the pontiff, Marozia dumped Guy and moved in on King Hugh himself, who was something of a horndog and an easy mark. In 932, his current wife conveniently died, and he married Marozia. Now, all she needed was for her son the pope to coronate her and she’d be the empress of the Western Empire.

It was all coming together with movie plot slickness. That is until her second son, Alberic II (remember him?) caught wind of Hugh’s plan to
blind
him so he’d never become competition for the throne. Marozia showed no sign of stopping this. In fact, she seemed to enjoy insulting the boy, who was still only eighteen. But, during a feast at court, Hugh slapped Alberic right in the face, and the boy was so humiliated that he ran out into the streets and incited a riot. The mob stormed the castle. Wanting none of this, Hugh hightailed it out of Rome and abandoned Marozia to her son, who promptly threw her into prison for the rest of her life.

Alberic II went on to rule Rome for the next twenty years and reduced the powers of his craven half-brother, John (who was still pope) to purely spiritual duties.

This sordid saga became the basis of the urban legend of Pope Joan—a mythical female pope. There were plenty more chapters of Church history almost as lurid as this, spanning several hundred years. Life among the popes was like a soap opera with Bibles and knives.

Ironically, it was during this period that the celibate priesthood changed from a popular option to a requirement. This was partly because it symbolized purity, but mostly it was so that dying bishops would leave their property to the Church instead of to their families. This was also the era when the formal posture for prayer became that of the shackled slave—on your knees with your wrists bound together—because good Christians were slaves to Christ. Just the cheery thought you needed to get you through famines, plagues, and conquests.

Angels

One of the few sources of comfort in those days was the idea that angels were watching over you. This was a little odd since, in the Bible, angels deliver more bad news than good. But they were a convenient way for God to communicate with humans without committing to actual face time.

To this day, angels are enormously popular. You can sell anything from a coffee mug to a drum full of radioactive waste if you stick an angel on it. Some 80% of Americans believe in them. Of course, almost as many of us believe in space aliens, which are really a modern update of the same idea—higher intelligences from the sky who appear in humanoid form to help us clueless people prepare for a better world to come. They both tend to dress in simple clothes, glow in the dark, and never show up for crowds or cameras.

Now, if you’re in any business long enough, you inevitably build up a bureaucracy. Alas, even heaven wasn’t immune to this phenomenon. By the Middle Ages, religious scholars with nothing better to do spent their time shuffling the many angels mentioned in Scripture into an organization chart of the afterlife.

Tradition describes anywhere from nine to twelve rankings in the heavenly hierarchy, with each type having their own appearance and function. None of the angels in the Bible have halos or wings. While they’re often associated with music, they’re never described as playing the harp. Some played the trumpet, however, and I’ll bet the really cool ones blew a mean sax.

Jewish literature started these speculations of angelic organization. Centuries later, a fourth century Christian writer continued the work using passages from
Ephesians 6:12
and
Colossians 1:16
to establish nine levels of angels separated into three spheres or choirs.

The First Choir

Seraphim:
These angels are the highest of the high—beings of love and light that are closest to God. They sing his praises and make the heavens turn. They’re so radiant, other angels can’t even look at them, which is why they’re nicknamed “the burning ones.” The prophet Isaiah saw them as mutant griffins with six wings and four faces, but then Isaiah saw a lot of goofy stuff. Four of them surround God’s throne. Lucifer was supposedly the brightest of them until he launched his solo career.