The Long Middle

A farmer in 1100 heard the Bible only as it was read aloud in Latin, a language he did not speak, and learned the story from carvings, windows and plays performed outside the church door. He would have thought owning a book was something kings did.

People call these centuries "the dark ages," and the label does more harm than good. Yes, the lights of the old Roman world went out, learning shrank, and much of the church's leadership grew rich, political, and cruel. But a lamp kept burning the whole way through. If you own a Bible today, someone in this era copied it by hand so that you could.

When the empire collapsed, monasteries became lifeboats. Under Benedict's Rule, work and prayer, in balance, communities took in travelers, farmed, taught children, and above all copied books. A single Bible took one man the better part of a year and the skins of a small herd of animals. In the cold scriptorium at Jarrow, Bede wrote the history that still tells us what happened; he died in 735 dictating John's Gospel into English, and finished the last sentence before he stopped.

The gospel went north with men who had every reason to stay home. Patrick had been kidnapped from Britain at sixteen and sold as a slave in Ireland; when he escaped, he went back, voluntarily, to the people who had taken him. From Ireland Columba sailed to Iona in 563, and from Iona Aidan came down to Lindisfarne in 635, walking rather than riding so he could talk to whoever he met on the road.

Then England repaid the favor. In the 720s an English monk named Boniface walked into the German forests and cut down an oak sacred to Thor at Geismar while the crowd waited for the god to strike him dead. Nothing happened. The early account says he built a chapel out of the wood. He kept at it for thirty more years and was killed in Frisia in 754; the monastery at Fulda still displays a book, slashed through, said to be the one he lifted against the swords.

On Christmas Day in the year 800 a pope crowned Charlemagne emperor, and Europe got a Christian empire. That brought real good, schools, scholars, a clean new handwriting (our lowercase letters come from it), and manuscripts copied by the thousand. It also brought a terrible confusion. Charlemagne's wars in Saxony forced baptism at the point of a sword, and one campaign in 782 is reported to have ended in the execution of thousands of prisoners. A faith that spreads by conquest has already lost something it cannot get back by winning.

The other instinct was healthier. In 863 two brothers from Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, went to the Slavic peoples and did something obvious that almost nobody was doing: they built an alphabet so those people could read Scripture in their own language. Churchmen objected that only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were fit for holy things. The brothers appealed to Rome and, in 868, won. Everything Wycliffe and Tyndale would later be hunted for was already settled, once, in their favor.

In 1054 the church tore in half, East and West, and it is worth telling honestly because there is no cartoon villain in it. Greeks and Latins had drifted apart for centuries: different languages, different worship, a clause about the Holy Spirit that the West added to the Nicene Creed without a council, and Rome's growing claim to authority over all bishops. On July 16 papal legates left a decree of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the patriarch excommunicated them in return. Crusader armies sacking Constantinople in 1204 made the wound permanent. Both sides had arguments; both sides had pride. The mutual condemnations were finally lifted in 1965, and the churches are still apart.

Where did the medieval church go wrong? Name it plainly. Church offices were bought and sold. Popes commanded armies, and from 1309 the papacy sat in Avignon under French influence; from 1378 to 1417 rival popes each claimed the chair, and for a stretch there were three. Indulgences began as a way of easing the church's penances and drifted, over generations, into something that looked to ordinary people like buying forgiveness. And the Bible stayed in Latin. Books were chained in churches because they were worth more than a house, but in England the Constitutions of Oxford in 1408 went further and made it illegal to translate Scripture into English, or to own a translation, without a bishop's permission. When you have to get a license to read God's Word, something has gone badly wrong.

And yet faith burned on, often in the same building. Anselm was thinking his way to the heart of the cross while kings tried to bully him. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote about loving God for God's own sake. In 1209 a rich young man in Assisi took Jesus' words about leaving everything at face value, and Francis and his friars went out on foot to people the parish system had quit reaching. Later came the quiet writers, Julian of Norwich in her cell, Thomas à Kempis in his, whose books ordinary Protestants still read for their own souls.

The clearest protest came from the edges. Around 1173 Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, gave his money away, paid to have the Gospels translated into everyday speech, and preached. Condemned within a decade, the Waldensians were driven into the Alpine valleys and hunted there for three hundred years. They kept the Scriptures alive by memorizing them, because a copy in the house was evidence. They were still there when the Reformation arrived, and they joined it.

Two men are called morning stars. At Oxford, John Wycliffe argued that Scripture stands above the church's custom and that a plowman had a right to read it; the English Bible his circle produced was copied by hand and carried around the country by preachers called Lollards, at the cost of prison and, after 1401, the stake. Wycliffe died in his bed in 1384. Forty-four years later his bones were dug up, burned, and thrown in a river, a small revenge that changed nothing. His writings had already reached Prague.

There Jan Hus preached the same things in Czech and drew a nation. Summoned to the Council of Constance in 1415 with the emperor's written promise of safe conduct, he was tried and burned on July 6. His name means "goose" in his own language, and the tradition is that he said they might cook this goose, but a swan would come whom they could not silence. Whether or not he said it, his people kept the memory; the Bohemian Brethren organized in 1457, and their descendants become the Moravians who set the next great missionary era on fire.

The last piece was a machine. Around 1455 Gutenberg printed a Bible in Mainz, and within one lifetime the presses had produced more books than all the copyists of the previous thousand years. The hunger was already there, vernacular devotion, plays in the town square, roughly eighteen printed German Bibles before Luther ever wrote a word. Put a press beside that hunger and 1517 becomes not a miracle out of nowhere but a fire that finally found air. Nine hundred years, and God never left Himself without a witness.