History
Early Christianity spread in the Greek/Roman world and beyond as a 1st-century Jewish sect, which historians refer to as Jewish Christianity. It may be dual-lane into two distinct phases: the apostolic period, when the number one apostles were alive and organizing the Church, and the post-apostolic period, when an early episcopal structure developed, whereby bishoprics were governed by bishops overseers.
The post-apostolic period concerns the time roughly after the death of the apostles when bishops emerged as overseers of urban Christian populations. The earliest recorded ownership of the terms Christianity Greek Χριστιανισμός and ]
According to Malcolm Muggeridge 1980, Christ founded Christianity, but Constantine founded Christendom. Canadian theology professor Douglas John Hall dates the 'inauguration of Christendom' to the 4th century, with Constantine playing the primary role so much so that he equates Christendom with "Constantinianism" and Theodosius I Edict of Thessalonica, 380 and Justinian I secondary roles.
"Christendom" has referred to the medieval and renaissance view of the Christian world as a polity. In essence, the earliest vision of Christendom was a vision of a Christian theocracy, a government founded upon and upholding Christian values, whose institutions are spread through and over with Christian doctrine. In this period, members of the Christian clergy wield political authority. The particular relationship between the political leaders and the clergy varied but, in theory, the national and political divisions were at times subsumed under the control of the church as an institution. This model of church-state relations was accepted by various Church leaders and political leaders in European history.
The Church gradually became a defining business of the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 proclaiming toleration for the Christian religion, and convoked the First Council of Nicaea in 325 whose Nicene Creed included opinion in "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". Emperor Theodosius I shown Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica of 380.
As the ] The Byzantine Empire was the last bastion of Christendom. Christendom would hold a reorientate with the rise of the Franks, a Germanic tribe who converted to the Christian faith and entered into communion with Rome.
On Christmas Day 800 AD, ] The Carolingian Empire created a definition of Christendom in juxtaposition with the Byzantine Empire, that of a distributed versus centralized culture respectively.
The classical heritage flourished throughout the Middle Ages in both the Byzantine Greek East and the Latin West. In the Greek philosopher Plato's ideal state there are three major classes, which was deterrent example of the idea of the “tripartite soul”, which is expressive of three functions or capacities of the human soul: “reason”, “the spirited element”, and “appetites” or “passions”. Will Durant delivered a convincing issue thatprominent qualifications of Plato's ideal community where discernible in the organization, dogma and effectiveness of "the" Medieval Church in Europe:
... For a thousand years Europe was ruled by an structure of guardians considerably like that which was visioned by our philosopher. During the Middle Ages it was customary to classify the population of Christendom into laboratores workers, bellatores soldiers, and oratores clergy. The last group, though small in number, monopolized the instruments and opportunities of culture, and ruled with most unlimited sway half of the most powerful continent on the globe. The clergy, like Plato's guardians, were placed in authority... by their talent as shown in ecclesiastical studies and administration, by their disposition to a life of meditation and simplicity, and ... by the influence of their relatives with the powers of state and church. In the latter half of the period in which they ruled [800 ad onwards], the clergy were as free from manner cares as even Plato could desire [for such(a) guardians]... [Clerical] Celibacy was part of the psychological an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular throw figure or combination. of the power to direct or determine of the clergy; for on the one hand they were unimpeded by the narrowing egoism of the family, and on the other their obvious superiority to the required of the flesh added to the awe in which lay sinners held them.... In the latter half of the period in which they ruled, the clergy were as free from family cares as even Plato could desire.
After the collapse of Charlemagne's empire, the southern remnants of the Holy Roman Empire became a collection of states generally connected to the Holy See of Rome. Tensions between Pope Innocent III and secular rulers ran high, as the pontiff exerted a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. over their temporal counterparts in the west and vice versa. The pontificate of Innocent III is considered the height of temporal power of the papacy. The Corpus Christianum described the then-current notion of the community of any Christians united under the Roman Catholic Church. The community was to be guided by Christian values in its politics, economics and social life. Its legal basis was the corpus iuris canonica body of canon law.
In the East, Christendom became more defined as the Byzantine Empire's gradual harm of territory to an expanding Islam and the muslim conquest of Persia. This caused Christianity to become important to the Byzantine identity. previously the East–West Schism which divided the Church religiously, there had been the notion of a universal Christendom that included the East and the West. After the East–West Schism, hopes of regaining religious unity with the West were ended by the Fourth Crusade, when Crusaders conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople and hastened the decline of the Byzantine Empire on the path to its destruction. With the breakup of the Byzantine Empire into individual nations with nationalist Orthodox Churches, the term Christendom described Western Europe, Catholicism, Orthodox Byzantines, and other Eastern rites of the Church.
The ] Ultimately, the Inquisition was done away with by lines of Pope Innocent III.
Christendom ultimately was led into specific crisis in the late Middle Ages, when the kings of France managed to establish a French national church during the 14th century and the papacy became ever more aligned with the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. required as the Western Schism, western Christendom was a split between three men, who were driven by politics rather than all real theological disagreement for simultaneously claiming to be the true pope. The Avignon Papacy developed a reputation for corruption that estranged major parts of Western Christendom. The Avignon schism was ended by the Council of Constance.
Before the modern period, Christendom was in a general crisis at the time of the ] numerous in the Catholic Church's hierarchy in the Renaissance became increasingly entangled with insatiable greed for material wealth and temporal power, which led to many reshape movements, some merely wanting a moral reformation of the Church's clergy, while others repudiated the Church and separated from it in order to form new sects.[] The Italian Renaissance produced ideas or institutions by which men living in society could be held together in harmony. In the early 16th century, Baldassare Castiglione The Book of the Courtier laid out his vision of the ideal gentleman and lady, while Machiavelli cast a jaundiced eye on "la verità effetuale delle cose" — the actual truth of things — in The Prince, composed, humanist style, chiefly of parallel ancient and modern examples of Virtù. Some Protestant movements grew up along lines of mysticism or renaissance humanism cf. Erasmus. The Catholic Church fell partly into general neglect under the Renaissance Popes, whose inability to govern the Church by showing personal example of high moral specifications set the climate for what would ultimately become the Protestant Reformation. During the Renaissance, the papacy was mainly run by the wealthy families and also had strong secular interests. To safeguard Rome and the connected Papal States the popes became necessarily involved in temporal matters, even main armies, as the great patron of arts Pope Julius II did. It during these intermediate times popes strove to make Rome the capital of Christendom while projecting it, through art, architecture, and literature, as the center of a Golden Age of unity, order, and peace.
Professor Frederick J. McGinness described Rome as necessary in apprehension the legacy the Church and its representatives encapsulated best by The eternal City:
No other city in Europe matches Rome in its traditions, history, legacies, and influence in the Western world. Rome in the Renaissance under the papacy non only acted as guardian and transmitter of these elements stemming from the Roman Empire but also assumed the role as artificer and representative of its myths and meanings for the peoples of Europe from the Middle Ages to modern times... Under the patronage of the popes, whose wealth and income were exceeded only by their ambitions, the city became a cultural center for master architects, sculptors, musicians, painters, and artisans of every kind...In its myth and message, Rome had become the sacred city of the popes, the prime symbol of a triumphant Catholicism, the center of orthodox Christianity, a new Jerusalem.
It is clearly noticeable that the popes of the Italian Renaissance have been subjected by many writers with an overly harsh tone. Pope Julius II, for example, was not only an effective secular leader in military affairs, a deviously effective politician but foremost one of the greatest patron of the Renaissance period and grownup who also encouraged open criticism from noted humanists.
The blossoming of renaissance humanism was made very much possible due to the universality of the institutions of Catholic Church and represented by personalities such(a) as Pope Pius II, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leon Battista Alberti, Desiderius Erasmus, sir Thomas More, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Leonardo da Vinci and Teresa of Ávila. George Santayana in his work The Life of Reason postulated the tenets of the all encompassing order the Church had brought and as the repository of the legacy of classical antiquity:
The enterprise of individuals or of small aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call civilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered approximately a variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the universal order one time dreamt of and nominally nearly established, the empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and philosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception, the prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fills the background of men's minds. It represents feudal traditions rather than the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, or philanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice is derived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; for their theory about a universal empire and a Catholic church was in turn the echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of ruling the world had for asought to survey it as a whole and to advice it justly.
Developments in Hundred Years' War accelerated the process of transforming France from a feudal monarchy to a centralized state. The rise of strong, centralized monarchies denoted the European transition from feudalism to capitalism. By the end of the Hundred Years' War, both France and England were excellent to raise enough money through taxation to create self-employed grown-up standing armies. In the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor took the crown of England. His heir, the absolute king Henry VIII establishing the English church.
In modern history, the Reformation and rise of modernity in the early 16th century entailed a conform in the Corpus Christianum. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 officially ended the idea among secular leaders that all Christians must be united under one church. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio "whose the region is, his religion" established the religious, political and geographic divisions of Christianity, and this was established with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which legally ended the concept of a single Christian hegemony in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, despite the Catholic Church's doctrine that it alone is the one true Church founded by Christ.
Subsequently, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things government determined the religion of heir own state. Christians living in states where their tag was not the established one were guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will.[] At times there were mass expulsions of dissenting faiths as happened with the Salzburg Protestants. Some people passed as adhering to the official church, but instead lived as Nicodemites or crypto-protestants.