Lecture 36: The Ever-adapting Religion
Abbey of Cluny and the hierarchical and liturgical dance of life
in that monastery.o The bishops who exercised care within dioceses in the 4th
century could hardly have imagined the central authority of
the papacy in the High Middle Ages, nor could Pope Gregory
I have understood the actions and claims of Gregory VII or
Innocent III.o The Christian gatherings in private homes and catacombs in the
first three centuries would have been swallowed by the grand
spaces of the Roman basilicas and the medieval cathedrals.o The evangelist Matthew, who reported Jesus as forbidding
retaliation, and the martyrs who willingly died despite being
treated unjustly could not have comprehended the logic behind
the Crusades that killed thousands of Christians, as well as
Jews and Muslims.o The structure and selling of indulgences, the system of
Scholastic theology, and the practice of the inquisition could
have found no place in Christianity’s earliest period.o Indeed, as the study of Christian theology and art can easily
demonstrate, even the conceptions of Christianity’s central
figure have undergone constant cultural adaptation.• Precisely such dramatic changes in religious and cultural forms
made the Protestant reformers charge that in Catholicism,
Christianity had also lost its essence and that only a return to the
earlier forms, such as those found in the New Testament, could
restore the truth of the Gospels.
o Thus, reformers insisted that the essence of Christianity—
authentic Christianity—was to be found in the elimination of
the elaborate and highly structured and a return to the simple
and spontaneous.