The Role Of Religion In The Medieval West

Bernard Hamilton. Religion in the Medieval West. Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc., 1986. 216 pp.

The main ideals and values that Medieval people held widely came from their understanding of the Church and their place in the world. Hamilton takes a meticulous comb through several topics to help the reader understand how the formation of the early Medieval church was paramount to how the rest of the age played out. Without the basics set down by temporal authority there would have been no west to build off of based on how the barbarians viewed life and land. Hamilton reiterates knowledge of the emergence of the Christian church, missions to convert the Germanic peoples, monasticism, and how people fit into their faith. These are all things
The ideas brought about by paganism were quite invasive to the Christian understanding of the world and needed to be remedied because of the natural devolvement of what pagans believed in versus how things happened according to the Church. In the early forms of the Medieval church we see one solution to the heretical practices that appears often, and it is the idea of Christianifying the pagan ideas so as to pick and choice what the Germanic people could and could not practice based on their own faith. This would all lead to varying forms of heretical Christianity that would have to be later dealt with by the Church and its missionaries. With this we see a more developed idea of Christianity and how the faith is supposed to be view along with how one is supposed to understand the sacraments. These were important concepts that were foundational to the faith and were groundbreaking later in the middle ages when disease and war ravaged the continent. This would also lead to Christianity being exposed to new religions along with already existing
We also receive a breakdown of the new religions and they practices and beliefs that are not as beneficial other than for general knowledge. Within this same category we also receive the eastern church and its role in how the west grew. There was little to no contact between the two and Hamilton is careful to mention this because by the time, in the later middle ages, the two halves of Christendom come back into contact they have developed quite differently from each other. This culminates in the western idea of how much more superior they felt they should have been because they had kept the original heart of their faith: Rome. While the differences were noticeable the results and outcomes of western Europe may have been quite different if the two halves of the Church were never split by varying