Fantastic Metropolis

But you see that a great multitude of people come, shining brightly; they forcefully tread the worm underfoot and severely torment it. This is to say that those who are born into human misery, but who constitute the faithful army of believers, hasten to attain their desire for Heaven by the faith of baptism and blessed virtues, which are beautiful adornments; and by their deeds they cast down the ancient seducer.

—Hildegard of Bingen, Nosce Vias Domini

The Ancient Seducer. We’ll come back to that. For now, let us consider the transition between centuries as the Church came to terms with the fact that not only had the world not ended, as many had expected it would (the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine had both believed that the world might well end in their lifetimes… Paul to the point that he believed that it was just as well to remain celibate and chaste and have no children, for they wouldn’t live very long anyway) but the Church itself, formerly an institution of prosecuted martyrs under tyrannical sorts like various Roman Emperors, had progressed to an arm of Imperial polity, survived the fall of the Western Empire and the concentration of Imperial power in the Byzantine Empire to the east, and by the time of Charlemagne it was clearly the case that Western Europe and Christendom considered themselves one and the same. No longer the underdog, the fisherman’s faith was now the living legacy of Rome, and while the average village priest might not seem a particularly awesome individual, the edifice of Catholicism itself was growing in temporal power as it spread and converted across Europe. By the time in 991 when the Archbishop of Rheims, the aforementioned Gerbert of Aurillac, had to swear “a solemn profession of faith in the sanctity of both the New and Old Testaments, in the legitimacy of marriage and of eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit per arbitrium, not by nature but by choice” the Church was a far different institution than the one the converted Saul of Tarsus helped create out of radical Judaism, and even from the young faith that won the heart of St. Augustine over his original Manichaeism. Augustine turned hard on his former faith, and even in the time of Hildegard his words were consulted by those concerned with heresy.

Augustine, for example, who remained an influential source for medieval Catholic theologians, attributed to his former Manichaean co-religionists sexual malpractices and even secret infanticide, but such claims appeared as early as Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 200) who declared that similar Roman accusations against the Christians were provoked by the depraved practices of heretical Gnostic groups like the Carpocratians. Irenaeus stated, moreover that the Carpocratians practiced magic, possessed love potions and conjured spirits and dream senders, whereas Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) accused them of libertinism and indiscriminate orgiastic love-feasts.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

When Christianity was new, it seethed against itself in an attempt to curry favor with the Roman power that still ruled much of Europe and Africa, while using the same slanders once employed against it to darken the name of its competitors: by the time Hildegard was born, the word “Manichaean” was synonymous throughout much of Europe with “devil-worshipper,” and Gnosticism was nearly forgotten and sneered at when it was recalled at all. But the fact was, by the turn of the tenth century Anno Domini, Christianity no longer had to curry favor from anyone: it was the established religious power, and in a position of authority in many nations at once… the Papacy had the enviable position of being a spiritual and temporal power at once, while also possessing an enviable extra-territorial nature, to the point where Churchmen were subject at times to Canon law over the law of the nation they resided in.