A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

power was the conversions of Arian or pagan kings who brought their subjects
with them. The Frankish king Clovis converted from Arianism to Catholicism at
the end of the fifth century. The Visigoth Reccared, another Arian, became
Catholic in 589 (although the Visigothic kingdom would be overrun by the
Arabs in 711). When the pagan Kentish king Aethelbert was converted by the
monk Augustine, who had been sent to Britain by Gregory in 597/8, some
10,000 (probably an exaggerated number) of his subjects were also baptised.
Although these mass conversions gave little scope for individual commitment, it
meant that the Church hierarchy and the secular rulers supported each other and,
however much pagan practice continued in the countryside, the influence of
Church power grew enormously. Christianity continued to spread, so that by 750
it extended from Italy to Gaul and present-day Germany, northern Spain and
Britain. A deeply symbolic moment came when Leo II consecrated Charlemagne
as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 800 and set up an institution that lasted,
despite its tensions between pope and emperor, for a thousand years.
Yet it would not be until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that papal
jurisdiction was fully accepted within western Christendom. For the time being
this proved, perhaps paradoxically, an immense advantage for the Church. The
lack of papal authority meant that new dioceses could be established by bishops
on their own initiative and local varieties of Christianity could take root and
flourish in a way that would have been impossible in a hierarchy imposed from
above. The sixth-century Rule of St Benedict, for instance, decreed that each
Benedictine house should be independent under its abbot, which enabled each
community to respond to local needs. In Ireland, ‘Christianity accommodated its
modes of organization to the small scale kingdoms and the politics of cattle and
kinship and had adapted biblical precepts in ways that made local sense’. 9
One of the most important developments sustaining this diversity was the rise
of shrines and the cults of saints, even if some of these saints had actually been
pagan holy men who had subsequently acquired ‘Christian’ status. For centuries,
saints gave religious institutions and the faithful a sense of identity, means of
protection and economic vitality. In Tours, the soldier-saint Martin was used as a
patron of his city, his vengeance promised to those who threatened it. (Many of
the ‘miracles’ associated with him involve the destruction of pagan shrines.) The
West Saxon kings used the martyr St Edmund as their own protector.
Monasteries with important relics, such as Fleury on the Loire, which had seized
the bones of St Benedict from Monte Cassino, freely used the sacred power of
these bones in their litigation and disputes with encroaching landowners. In