A long and very respectable tradition of thinking about the morality of warfare has accustomed us to looking at Augustine’s views on the ‘just war’ through the wrong end of a telescope. By common consent, Augustine is the fountain-head of a tradition almost ubiquitous in medieval thought, and still to be discovered lurking, as recently as last April, in a leading article in The Times. In reading Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Vittoria or Cardinal Bellarmine, one is constantly reminded that, as the author of the most recent study of the just war in the Middle Ages put it, ‘the influence of Augustine was all pervasive.’ The best of modern studies are, indeed, informed by a sense of the ambiguity of Augustine’s legacy to medieval thought; but even so, and unavoidably, they reinforce the tendency which leads us to think of Augustine as the father of this tradition of thinking. There is no need to question this consensus—indeed it seems to me to be very largely correct—to be conscious that there is nothing that can obscure the true nature of an original thought as radically as the tradition to which it gives rise. What, therefore, I am trying to do in this paper is, for once, to turn the telescope the right way round and to look at Augustine’s thinking not in the long perspective of the tradition which his ideas inaugurated, but in the immediate context of his own intellectual biography.

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.

Robert Burton was being as trite as Polonius when he advised his readers that the general causes of melancholy ‘are either supernatural or natural’. Apart from a small and notorious band of sceptics, all of Burton’s contemporaries agreed that mental diseases might be caused by natural accidents or supernatural forces. They attributed misery and madness to a myriad of particular misfortunes and afflictions. Sudden frights and insupportable griefs drove men mad; physical illnesses polluted their bodies and crazed their minds; horrible sins fed festering guilt and exposed them to God’s wrathful judgements; evil spirits and witches tormented them with awful temptations, suicidal desperation, stark insanity, and demonic possession. The defences against the material and immaterial enemies of human happiness were as varied as the sources of misery themselves. Mentally disturbed people were treated with drugs and therapeutic regimens to restore the balance of their humours, with religious counsel and prayer to ease their spiritual afflictions, and with amulets, charms, and exorcisms to protect them against the malignancy of demons and witches.

For the author of the longer prologue to Lex Salica, writing in 763–4 in the reign of Pippin I, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, the Franks’ devotion to the martyrs was the secret of their success. It proved the strength of their Christian faith; it was at once the manifestation and the explanation of special divine favour. Vivit qui Francos diligit Christus….

Einhard tells us that Charlemagne had a special liking for ‘those books of St Augustine called The City of God’. If only he had told us why. Did Charlemagne demand readings from book 5 on the happy Christian emperors? Or was he, as Ladner suggests, particularly attracted by ‘the idea of a society embracing earth and heaven, a society which a man could join through personal renewal’? If Ladner is right, then, he tells us, we should talk not of a Carolingian renaissance—‘secondary classicising features notwithstanding’—but of a Carolingian reform ‘as just one phase in the unfolding history of the realisation of the Reform idea in Christian history’ and specifically ‘an attempt to recreate the religious culture of the fourth and fifth centuries’. But is Lander right about Charlemagne? I have my doubts: perhaps what he really enjoyed most was book 22’s meaty chapter on the resurrection of the flesh or its rattling good miracle-story.

I must begin with the words of the clergyman: ‘My short sermon for today is divided into three parts. One: God. Two: Man. Three: The Universe.’ It will be impossible to do justice to the subject in hand in the short span of one lecture. This is not only because of the vast range of time and space involved in any consideration of the parting of the ways between eastern and western Christianity in the late antique period. To embark on such a theme involves holding up for scrutiny the very nature of ecclesiastical history. For what we have to deal with is not merely what happened in the relations between east and west, but why what happened happened as it did. Once the ecclesiastical historian asks why, he will find himself sooner or later forced to grapple with the whole quality of men’s lives in the past—that is, with how they lived the full twenty-four hours of the day, not only in their books, but in their churches, not only in their churches, but in the most intimate and most monotonous rhythms of their life.

I begin with the central fact about Christian origins: that although the earliest surviving Christian documents are in greek and although Christianity spread from city to city in the graeco-roman world, its Founder lived and preached almost entirely outside the area of graeco-roman civilisation proper; the world in which he was active was not at all that of the polis (the city) but the very different world of the chōra (the countryside). This may require some explanation.

Between December 1095 and July 1096 there took place the first pogrom in western European History, a series of events so distressing to the Jewish people that rumours of them reached the Near East in advance of the First Crusade, inspiring the communities there with messianic fervour, while dirges in honour of the martyrs are recited in the synagogues to this day. The first outbreaks seem to have occurred in France soon after the preaching of the crusade and the first evidence of them is a letter written by the French communities to their Rhineland counterparts, warning them of the impending threat. It is possible that persecution was widespread in France, even though the details of it are lost, apart from a reference to an anti-Jewish riot which broke out among men gathering to take the cross in Rouen. Much more evidence is available about events in the Rhineland. On 3 May 1096 the storm broke over the community at Speyer, where a crusading army of Rhinelanders and Swabians under Count Emich of Leiningen had gathered.

This essay is an attempt to explore the cultural logics behind two very different orientations towards spirits (divinities), one Chinese and the other Christian, and the kinds of religious subjects that are produced by practices informed by these two differing orientations. Specifically, I examine the role the household plays in Chinese religious life as a site and structural unit to host different categories of spirits (gods, ghosts and ancestors), and contrast this with the Christian idiom of being hosted by God. In Christianity, God is the supreme host; humans (Christians) can only be guests at God’s banquet but they cannot host God in return. It is explicitly an unequal relationship. And even though they are unworthy of such generous treatment Christians must accept this divine grace and join the communion. The eucharist, the most important Christian ritual for almost all Christians, is a constant reminder to Christians that they are guests, and that when they go to heaven, they will be God’s guests eternally. In the Chinese case, on the other hand, the household hosts the spirits by providing offerings. Gods, ghosts and ancestors are invited to the bountiful banquet at fixed times of the year and then sent off when the banquets are over. The spirits can only be guests; they do not, and indeed cannot, host human guests. In Chinese religious culture there are no accounts of spirits, be they deities, ancestors or ghosts, hosting humans. In the Chinese hosting of spirits, the guest is accorded honour and respect, but it is the host who is the most active, potent and pre-eminent agent. In other words, agency rests with humans. And the social idiom of hosting enframes the entire cluster of ritual actions.

With their steady series of conquests during the eighth century, adding Alemannia, Frisia, Aquitaine, the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy, Septimania, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brittany to the Frankish heartlands in Gaul, the Carolingians created what Ganshof regarded as an unwieldy empire. Was the Carolingian Church unwieldy too? Recent work, notably that of Janet Nelson, has underlined not only the political ideologies that helped to hold the Frankish realms together, but also the practical institutions and actions of individuals in government and administration. Can the same be done for the Church? Despite the extraordinary diversity of the Carolingian world and its ecclesiastical traditions, can it be described as a unity? What sense of a ‘Frankish Church’ or of ‘Frankish ecclesiastical institutions’ can be detected in the sources?

One has to be brave to return to the subject of Byzantine Iconoclasm, a subject which, we may feel, has been done to death. But the division in Byzantine society which lasted off and on for over a century, from 726 to the ‘restoration of orthodoxy’ in 843, was so profound that any Byzantine historian must at some time try to grapple with it. This is especially so if one is trying to understand the immediately preceding period, from the Persian invasions of the early seventh century to the great sieges of Constantinople by the Arabs in 674-8 and 717. It is well recognized by historians that this was a time of fundamental social, economic, and administrative change, which coincided with, but was by no means wholly caused by, the loss of so much Byzantine territory to the Arabs. However, the connection, if any, of this process of change with the social and religious upheaval known as Iconoclasm still leaves much to be said; indeed, no simple connection is likely in itself to provide an adequate explanation. In this paper I want to explore further some of the background to the crisis, without attempting here to provide a general explanation for Iconoclasm itself. I shall not venture beyond the first phase of Iconoclasm, which ended with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and after which the argument is somewhat different. Indeed, I shall be focusing here not even on the period known as ‘first Iconoclasm’, but mainly on the preceding period, when the issues inherent in the controversy were already, and increasingly, making themselves felt. Though we shall inevitably be concerned with some of the arguments brought against icons by their opponents, it is the place of images themselves in the context of the pre-Iconoclastic period which will be the main issue. Finally, while I want to offer a different way of reading the rise of icons, I do not pretend that it is the only one, or even possibly the most important. I do suggest, though, that it can help us to make sense of some of the issues that were involved.

The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.

The early thirteenth century was an extraordinary period in the history of piety. Throughout Europe, and especially in urban communities, lay men and women were seized by a new religious fervour which could be satisfied neither by the new orders nor by the secular clergy. Lay groups proliferated, proclaiming the absolute and literal value of the gospels and practising a new life-style, the vita apostolica. This religious feeling led to the formation, on the eve of the fourth lateran council, of numerous orders of ‘poor men’ and shortly afterwards, to the foundation of the mendicant orders. From this novel interpretation of evangelical life women by no means wished to be excluded and many female groups sprang simultaneously into being in areas as far distant as Flanders and Italy. Yet how were such groups to be regarded because current attitudes to women were based on inconsistent and contradictory doctrines? It was difficult to provide the conditions under which they could achieve their desire for sanctity as they were not allowed to enter the various orders available to men. How then were men to reply to the demands of these women for participation in religious life? That there should be a reply was evident from the widespread heresy in just those areas in which the ferment of urban life encouraged the association of pious women. And heretics were dangerously successful with them! For the church, the existence of religious and semi-religious communities of women raised, in turn, many problems, not least the practicalities involved in both pastoral care and economic maintenance. Only, after 1215, when it attempted to regulate and discipline them, did it realise the widespread enthusiasm on which their movement was based.

Just over a century ago Heinrich Hagenmeyer published his definitive book on Peter the Hermit. It has shaped most subsequent discussions of Peter’s career, and it must be said at once that no completely new material has come to light since then. There is, however, a problem of perpetual interest posed by the divergences among twelfth-century accounts of the origins of the First Crusade. Until the advent of modern historiography, it was accepted that the expedition was provoked by an appeal from the church of Jerusalem, brought to the west by Peter the Hermit, who had visited it as a pilgrim, had seen a vision of Christ and had been entrusted by the patriarch with a letter asking for help against the oppression of the Christians there. The crusade was on this view born in the atmosphere of pilgrimage, visions and popular preaching which continued to mark its course, and is so evident in, for example, the discovery of the Holy Lance and the visions and messages which accompanied it. Peter is in some sense the embodiment of these charismatic elements, and there is no controversy about his prominence in the history of the movement. He appears as a sensationally successful preacher, who recruited and led a large contingent which left in advance of the main armies, and was cut to pieces in Asia Minor. Thereafter, he appears in the chronicles in a variety of capacities: as a runaway, and an ambassador to the Moslems, as an adviser, as an associate with the popular element among the crusaders, and finally as a guide to the sacred sites at Jerusalem. It is, however, not with these wider aspects of his career that we wish to deal in this paper, but with his special role in the summoning of the expedition. The older view was that he was its first author. Every student of the early church is familiar with militant monks and hermits. It was once believed that Peter, their spiritual descendant, was the most supremely successful of all the ascetic warmongers.

In May 1382 William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury since the murder of his predecessor Sudbury during the Peasants’ Revolt the previous year, declared it to be a matter of frequent complaint and common report that evil persons were going about his province preaching without authority, and spreading doctrines which threatened to destroy not only ecclesiastical authority but civil government as well. They were the adherents, he was informed, of a certain teacher of novelties at Oxford, named John Wyclif, whose sect broadcast the seeds of pestiferous error so widely in the pastures of Canterbury that only the most savage hoeing would root them out. The chroniclers hastened to confirm this account. According to their accounts, by 1382 Wyclif had been able, through his writings and the preaching of his followers, to seduce the laity, including great lords and members of the nobility, over a great part of the realm. Even members of the clergy and scholars were not free from infection. Thus Knighton commented that – at least in the area around Leicester – every other person one met was a Lollard. Thirty years later it is the same story in Bohemia. As the carthusian prior Stephen of Dolany complained, despite the condemnation of Wyclif’s teachings at the university of Prague in 1403, the Wycliffites swarmed everywhere: ‘in the state apartments of princes, in the schools of the students, in the lonely chambers of the monks, and even in the cells of the Carthusians’.

The notable part played by women in the Reformation has rarely been given its due recognition in English historical studies. In recent years Professor Wallace Notestein has written with characteristic authority and grace on ‘The English Woman, 1580-1650,’ but one does not learn from this essay that the English women of this age had any religious propensities at all. And leaving aside the more prominent figures such as Queen Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, and Catherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, women make but few appearances in most accounts of the English Reformation. This is no doubt only one symptom of the tendency of so many of our histories to dwell upon the officially inspired aspects of the Reformation to the neglect of the spontaneous and the local; to be concerned with the making of settlements and their enforcement rather than with the means by which Protestantism actually spread in families, towns, and other communities. And of course there are special factors which obscure the female contribution to history, the legal disabilities of the sex, which so often hide the married woman and allow us to catch glimpses only of the widow, a ‘person’ in law.

When Martin became bishop of Tours c370, Christianity had already taken root in the town; but the surrounding countryside was still untouched by the new religion. Although it was over fifty years since Constantine had first recognised Christianity, and thirty-three years since Tours had had a permanent bishop, the attention of the Gallic bishops had been distracted first by the Arian heresy, and latterly by Julian’s revival of paganism. Martin was therefore the first bishop of Tours to concern himself with the conversion of the countryside, and this work was continued by his successors in the fifth and sixth centuries.

There are those ready to admire the Puritans almost for the very name (as did Spurgeon), and there are others who like Sir Andrew Aguecheek when confronted with ‘a kind of Puritan’ are ready ‘to beat him like a dog’ (as did Macaulay): but may we not with Sir Toby say to both these groups, ‘For being a Puritan? Thine exquisite reason?’—for Sir Toby, even in his cups, saw the need apparently to distinguish and define.

The problem of Puritanism is to define what it was and who the Puritans were—a fact often recognised but leading to little change in the treatment of the subject which is nearly always regarded as a comprehensive but homogeneous entity. Three examples may suffice to show what difficulties may arise for those who, seeking instruction, go to the most respected authors. First, A. S. P. Woodhouse, in Puritanism and Liberty, writes that ‘Puritanism is an entity’ capable of being extended to cover ‘the varied forces generated by the Protestant Reformation and given their opportunity by the revolt against the Crown and the Church in the first half of the seventeenth century.’ However, it is also possible to describe the Puritans as ‘the more conservative,’ ‘the strictly calvinistic,’ who ‘followed the Genevan pattern in Church and State’ and were ‘synonymous with Presbyterians.’ But, ‘the cleavage between the Presbyterians and sectaries is marked,’ yet this division leaves ‘the problem of the centre party, the Independents.’ Following Troeltsch one can speak of ‘a Puritan church type and a Puritan sect type, the ideal of the holy community is true of all the Puritan groups.’ Finally, ‘it is not necessary to posit a unity but there is continuity in Puritan thought.’ Here, as elsewhere, as soon as a statement is made a qualification of it, if not a contradiction of it, becomes necessary.

‘Comparisons are odorous’. Modern historians, far from sharing Dogberry’s repugnance, have found the scent of the comparative method irresistible. ‘Perhaps even the future of our discipline’ depended on its pursuit, wrote Marc Bloch in 1928. Since then, comparison has become fashionable enough, and hardly remarkable in our contemporaries’ work. Remarkable it certainly is, however, in the ninth century. I would like to begin by quoting a passage written in 857 or 858 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims: