Holier Than Thou:
Religious Rise and Ruin in the Middle Ages
A long-standing practice of etiquette cautions discussions of politics or religion in mixed company, a group of people who may not hold the same beliefs or stance in either arena. So indeed, this can be applied to a review of the growth of Christianity through the roughly one thousand years of Medieval Europe. Whether noble or peasant, vassal or serf, one could have quickly found themselves in danger physically, socially, and spiritually should they not worship the same god in the same way as everyone else in their village. It may seem almost easy now to look back at the three periods making up Medieval times and analyze primary and secondary sources to reveal the political, social, and religious climates, but even historians can never be absolutely certain of how those
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Was confession enough to make a soul sing the praises of God such as Augustine? Or did the previous centuries of polytheism and paganism give rise to even more staunch rituals? Family made up a large part of all of these cultures; save for the lone shepherds, people wanted to be surrounded by their family, to make a physical, emotional, spiritual, and moral home around those bonds. Practicing a religion together strengthened those ties; people felt like they were a part of something bigger than they each were individually, and they wanted to belong. Why, then, would anyone not want to take up the cause for spreading Christianity throughout the lands? Some may attribute this to original sin, the temptations of Adam and Eve. Others may find reason in Scholatacism, the rise of schools of rational thought where concepts such as the Holy Trinity, or heaven and hell, or an omniscient being were challenged and questioned. Not all who should have believed did, but so long as they appeared to, they were not cast out from their