The Conversion of the Peoples

Once the Empire had become Christian, the Gospel found itself before a new task. It was no longer a matter of winning individuals within one same civilization, but of converting whole peoples, foreign and often hostile, who poured over the West as Rome collapsed. In five centuries, from the fall of the Empire to the year 1000, these peoples became Christian, and from their conversion Europe was born.

Converting a People through Its King

Among the Germanic and Slavic peoples, religion was the affair of the whole people: it belonged to the tribe and its chief. Mission therefore often passed through the kings, for when a king received baptism, his people followed. Clovis, king of the Franks, urged by his Christian wife Clotilda and baptized at Reims by bishop Remigius, entered the catholic faith with his warriors around the year 500; this choice was decisive, and Gaul became a Christian land bound to Rome. Later, other kingdoms entered the faith through their sovereigns: Poland with duke Mieszko in 966, Hungary with king Stephen around the year 1000, the Rus’ of Kiev with prince Vladimir in 988. The conversion began at the top, then descended and took root over the generations, as the faith penetrated hearts and customs.

A more decisive cause was added to Clotilda’s influence. At the height of a battle he was losing against the Alamanni, at Tolbiac around 496, Clovis vowed to embrace his wife’s God if that God gave him the victory; he won, and kept his word. The act repeats that of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge: a leader who, in the peril of arms, entrusts his fate to the God of the Christians and converts after the triumph.

The Fight against Arianism

Several of these peoples first received a faith flawed at its root. Evangelized long before by Arian missionaries, the Goths, the Vandals and others believed in a Christ inferior to the Father, according to the error condemned at Nicaea. This Arianism kept them separated from the Roman population, which had remained catholic, and falsified their faith at its root. Their passage to the right faith was therefore crucial. The choice of the Franks, catholic from their baptism, took on there its full importance: it made them the allies of the Roman Church and, little by little, the people around which the Christian West would be rebuilt.

The most striking case was that of the Visigoths of Spain. Arian for nearly two centuries, kept apart from the Hispano-Roman population that had remained catholic, they passed at once to the faith of Nicaea when their king Reccared abjured Arianism and had it proclaimed for his whole kingdom at the Third Council of Toledo, in 589. It was in Spain, in this very fight against Arianism, that the West added to the Creed the word Filioque, to affirm that the Son is truly God; born there, the formula would later weigh in the rupture with the East.

The Evangelizing Monks

The bulk of the work was carried by the monks, set out from the monasteries. Ireland, which Rome had never conquered, received the faith from Patrick, a former slave who returned of his own accord to evangelize the people who had enslaved him; it became a land of monasteries from which missionaries, such as Columban, set out again to revive the faith on the continent. In 597, pope Gregory the Great sent the monk Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons of England. These same English in turn gave Boniface, the apostle of Germania, who felled an oak consecrated to the god Thor to show the pagans the powerlessness of their idols, founded bishoprics and organized the Church among the Germans, always in link with Rome. So the mission advanced, monastery after monastery, under the guidance of the apostolic see.

This bond with Rome was at times slow to form. Ireland and Britain, long cut off from the continent, kept usages inherited from an isolated Celtic tradition, among them a different date of Easter and a different tonsure. In England, where the mission come from Rome met the one come from Ireland, the disagreement was settled at the synod of Whitby, in 664: the king of Northumbria chose the Roman usage, and the Churches of the isles gradually came into accord with the see of Peter.

The Slavs, Cyril and Methodius

In the ninth and tenth centuries, the faith reached the Slavic peoples. Two Greek brothers of Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, were their apostles. To proclaim the Gospel to them, they did a thing then new: they created an alphabet suited to the Slavic language and translated into it the Scriptures and the liturgy, so that each might pray and understand in his own tongue. This was to recognize that the faith does not abolish peoples, but weds their language in order to reach them. Some Slavs received the faith from Rome, like Poland and Bohemia; others from Constantinople, like the Rus’. This double origin already traced the line that, after the rupture of 1054, would separate catholic Europe from Orthodox Europe.

The Birth of Christian Europe

By the end of the Middle Ages, all of Europe was Christian. From the meeting of the Gospel, the heritage of Rome and the youth of the new peoples was born a civilization, Christendom, which would give its cathedrals, its universities and its saints. The conversion had been slow and imperfect, and at times imposed by force. Charlemagne, subduing the pagan Saxons, waged on them a war of thirty years and mingled baptism with conquest, going so far, it is said, as to have thousands of prisoners massacred at Verden in 782; to convert by the sword betrayed the Gospel one claimed to spread. Paganism, moreover, survived long in the countryside, and the faith of the first converts was often crude before it matured. But it had given Europe its unity and its soul, and prepared the centuries in which the faith would penetrate the whole life of men.

The very word says it: “pagan” comes from the Latin paganus, the dweller of the countryside. The faith had first taken root in the towns, and the old religion withdrew to where it reached last, to the fields and the villages.

This reproach was made by the age itself. Alcuin, the learned counselor of Charlemagne, wrote to the emperor that faith is born of the will and not of constraint, and that baptism imposed on the Saxons, with the tithe exacted from them, drove them away instead of winning them. Faith can be preached; it cannot be forced.