Augustinian canons

In my previous post I discussed cathedral chapters.  Here I discuss another group of priests, "canons regular" or Augustinian canons, who also served churches in a body--just not cathedral churches.

Canons were groups of priests who brought the liturgy and pastoral care to the broader world, as opposed to monks, where the group of religious men spent their days in isolated prayer and contemplation.  One could always of course have individual priests attached to a parish church, but canons by definition were priests who functioned in groups of other priests.

Cathedral priests/cathedral canons were of course attached to a cathedral and were called "secular canons" because they reached out to the secular world.  Many other churches acquired bodies of canons.  In some cases, an old monastery was too small and too poor to support the monastic life, so the monks were replaced by canons, who were able to live from payments for baptisms, burials, and the like, which monks (isolated from the world) did not receive.  (Officially of course one did not have to pay for the sacraments, but it would be extremely tacky not to.  Imagine getting married today and not bothering to pay the minister.  But if you don't pay him, he won't sue you.)

In the eleventh century, many bodies of secular canons (ones not attached to cathedrals) decided that the life they were living was not pure enough and thus decided to follow a semi-monastic rule.  The rule most often settled on was based on a letter Saint Augustine had written back in the fifth century, when he really hadn't had Augustinian canons in mind, but that was not a problem.  His holiness and antiquity worked just fine as a justification for them adopting his "rule."

These canons regular lived in common, sharing a dormitory, sharing their refectory (cafeteria), sharing all their possessions.  They followed a simple life of a vegetarian diet and a lack of comforts.  In this way they look a lot like monks.  However, they spent their days in parish activities.  Their elected head was called a dean, rather than an abbot.

By the early twelfth century in France, almost all urban churches were served by a body of Augustinian canons.  Wealthy urban families who might feel no connection to rural monasteries, generally supported by the aristocracy, made gifts to support these canons.  The people who lived nearby would consider a church of canons their church.  In one case, in what is now Belgium, the canons had been reading the history of early monasticism in Egypt and decided to head off to become desert fathers themselves.  They sneaked off during the night, but the distraught townspeople pursued them and brought them back and got the bishop to order them not to try that again.

Cathedral canons on the Continent never adopted any version of the Augustinian rule.  In some cathedrals in England, however, such as Canterbury, the cathedral canons did indeed seek to follow such a semi-monastic form of life.

The example of the different kinds of canons indicates the complexity of the medieval church, rarely reflected in historical fiction (including mine).

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Bishops

Medieval Christianity was run by its bishops, as indeed was the organized church from the beginning.  So, what's a bishop? you say.  He was the head Christian of a region (there are now female bishops in some denominations, but there were not any in the Middle Ages).

The early Christian communities were self-governing.  The local Christians elected their leader, the bishop.  (Modern Amish communities still do the same thing.)  The word comes from the Greek, as do all words from early Christianity, episkopos, meaning someone in charge, an overseer (think of the root epi-, as in epicenter, plus "scoping things out").  The word became episcopus in Latin; take the -e- off the front and you'll see where we get the word 'bishop'.

Early Christian bishops tried to coordinate, but no one was in charge of the others.  Any sort of dispute or question would be settled by a council, where the bishops would meet, discuss, and vote.  One of the most important early councils was Nicaea of 325, which determined the nature of the Trinity.  At this point, the Emperor Constantine was beginning to tolerate Christianity (he was baptized on his deathbed), so bishops were able to make their religion and their flocks more public and start building churches.  A cathedral (on which see more here) is a church for a bishop.

Each bishop was in charge of a diocese, his region, which in the old Roman Empire corresponded to the pagus, the basic geographic unit of imperial administration.  In the west, counties, headed by counts, also corresponded to the pagus, creating tensions between bishop and count throughout the Middle Ages.

Early bishops were married, with families, though by the sixth century western bishops generally were single or widowed—or adopted separate bedrooms.  In Byzantium, however, where early Christianity evolved into Greek Orthodoxy, bishops still married.  Modern Protestantism, self-consciously following the practice of the early church, returned to married bishops.

By the fifth or sixth century, it came to be taken for granted that five bishoprics were "first among equals," those of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria (a great learning center in Egypt), Jerusalem, and Antioch (Peter's city, according to the New Testament).  They were honored with the title 'papa', meaning (naturally) Daddy.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, all of these cities except for Rome and Constantinople had Christianity essentially disappear, leaving only the bishops of Rome and Constantinople, the forerunners of the pope and the Greek Orthodox patriarch (see more here on early medieval popes).

In practice, bishops, not popes, continued to run Christianity between them until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as discussed more here.  Bishops held councils to decide any important issues and were still locally elected, by both powerful lay people and by the priests of the diocese.  During the twelfth century, however, election was restricted to the cathedral canons, the priests who served the cathedral and helped the bishop run the diocese.  In the thirteenth century, popes began insisting that they, and only they, could choose bishops.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015 

For more on the medieval church, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

A medieval cathedral

A cathedral is not merely a big church.  It is the church of a bishop, the head of the church in his region. When the Roman Empire became Christianized, starting in the third century and especially in the fourth, each administrative unit of the Empire got its own bishop, elected by the local Christians.  The cathedral, that is the bishop's church, was the first church of a region.  The earliest churches date from the fourth century, when Christianity became tolerated in the Empire, so people dared worship publicly rather than in secret.

Soon other churches grew up in the cities around the cathedral, including churches attached to monasteries.  Every century or so the cathedral priests would decide their church was hopelessly old-fashioned and rebuild.  There are essentially no remnants of cathedrals built before the eighth or ninth centuries, because they have been rebuilt so many times.  Occasionally, however, a cathedral may still have its sixth-century crypt, where important people were buried.

The twelfth century was a period of rapid growth, in population, in the economy, and in religious enthusiasm.  Many eighth- and ninth-century cathedrals were rebuilt then, and the monasteries were also rebuilding their churches.  In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the new Gothic style was coming in, marked by greater height and more windows, those cathedrals that had not already been rebuilt undertook new building programs.

(One assumes that the monastic churches, which had looked very new and modern in the early twelfth century, looked very dark and old-fashioned compared to Gothic, but the monasteries had already spent their money and couldn't undertake new renovations.)

Cathedrals were now so big that they might take generations to build.  Auxerre cathedral, seen above, was begun in the thirteenth century and finished (more or less) in the fourteenth.  It was intended to have two towers on the front but only has one, because the money ran out.

They were designed and built by professional architects and stone masons.  There is now a popular though mistaken belief that ordinary people built cathedrals.  But without knowing what you are doing, it is extremely hard to work stone and make it come out right.  Most of Europe's cathedrals today are primarily products of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  They were big, they were extremely expensive, and they were highly decorated, to the glory of God.  There might be major changes to the interior decoration, but the exterior has stayed the same since the Middle Ages.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity and here for more on the medieval church.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Christianity

I was brought up Protestant.  One day a well-meaning neighbor asked my mother how I could possibly want to study the Middle Ages:  "After all, they were all Catholic then."

This is a common belief but not strictly true.  Protestantism, like modern Catholicism, is an heir to medieval Christianity.  Modern denominations are the product of a good three thousand years of monotheism growing, enlarging, and then splitting.  Ancient Judaism gave rise both to Christianity and to more recent versions of Judaism.  Early Christianity split into Eastern Orthodoxy and western (Latin) Christianity.  Islam borrowed from both Judaism and Christianity as well as from many revelations of its own.  Medieval (Latin) Christianity split into Protestantism and Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and Protestantism has since split into numerous denominations.

Modern Catholicism differs from medieval Christianity in a great many ways, as does modern Protestantism.  Yet Catholicism is happy to claim the Middle Ages as its own, stressing continuity, whereas Protestants sometimes act as though there were a curious thousand year gap between early Christianity and Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

And of course, as I discuss in another post, it is counter-productive at best to label medieval Christianity (or for that matter any religion) as "superstition" just because it differs from one's own.

Medieval people took religion extremely seriously.  Whereas modern America will spend millions on commercial buildings (think the Trump Tower), the biggest, grandest medieval buildings were the cathedrals, built for the glory of God.  Modern Europeans, for the most part, still get married and buried and have their children baptized in churches built during the Middle Ages.

This did not mean that everyone was Christian.  There were always small Jewish communities in western Europe, tolerated for much of the Middle Ages—though subject to intermittent persecution from about 1100 on.  There were always plenty of doubters and scoffers, though all medieval accounts assure us that these people were appropriately struck down by the saints.  For most people, most of the time, if you were baptized and said you were Christian, you counted as Christian.  The church had far too much to do to inquire too closely into peasants' beliefs.

One will sometimes hear that "everyone had to obey the pope" in the Middle Ages, but this is far from true.  For much of the Middle Ages, most people had no clue even who the pope was, much less what he thought.  And when popes first asserted their authority as head of the church, they immediately got into knock-down, drag-out battles with the emperors.

But that is a story of another post.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval Christianity and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.