The completion of F. S. Schmitt's critical edition of the Opera omnia of St. Anselm of Canterbury, with its elimination of a good many spurious meditations and prayers and with its recalendaring of the old and the newly identified correspondence, has stimulated widespread interest in the father of scholasticism. In the present study I wish to show that Anseim's Cur Deus Homo is a “penitential-eucharistic,” as distinguished from a “baptismal,” theory of the atonement. This is a terminology which must be explained at once.

“Why are these fools awaiting the end of the world?” This remark, said to have been made by Pope Boniface VIII during the perusal of a Joachite treatise, typifies what must have been the reaction of many thirteenth century popes to the eschatological groups of the time. With some notable exceptions, the popes of the century were men from a single mold: lawyers, administrators, dynasty builders—men trained to expand the interests of the best organized and most efficient government in Europe, the church. Though it would be a serious error to see the concerns of these men as purely political, for religion and politics were mingled in the thirteenth century in inextricable fashion, there was a practicality and a sense of reality to the lawyer popes that shines through Boniface's impatient outburst at the visionary mutterings and interminable squabbles of those who thought the end was near.

For those wishing to generalize about the Victorians the Great Exhibition of 1851 usually proves irresistable. But it does seem an obvious omission that so little is said about the disorders which kept the country upended during the preceding six months, that is, during the episode of the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the “Papal Aggression”. Christopher Dawson has urged that the one needs the other to symbolize properly the Victorian frame of mind. Here I wish to outline the underlying causes of this last great outburst of No-Popery feeling in an effort to trace the paradox of the aroused, angry, bigoted Guy Fawkes Day-men of November appearing the next summer as the staid, curious and progressive-minded citizens sunning themselves in the glory of all that glittering machinery so carefully displayed beneath the vaulted glass dome of their Crystal Palace.

Several recent scholars appalled by the seemingly impossible task of defining Puritanism have contented themselves with the supposedly easier task of describing the movement. But, a really accurate description is actually a good definition. To the extent that a description enables one to identify and thus partially to understand a man or a movement, it serves as a definition. Thus, whether one wishes to engage in a definition of or a description of the nature of Puritanism makes little difference. The basic problem is that of so delineating the Puritan movement that its differences from other contemporary movements are clearly discernible. Only in that way can one assess its role in its own epoch and its contributions to the ongoing stream of history.

In his comparative analysis of various millennial movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge constructs a formula for cultural change, which he defines as “old rules” to “no rules” to “new rules.” The first phase of these movements invariably involves a period of social unrest. Society deviates from the old rules as old formulas fail and institutions malfunction. People flout the political, religious, and social establishments with seemingly unpatriotic, blasphemous, and antisocial acts. In the next phase, society hangs between the old order and the new in an interim period in which neither the old standards nor the new hold sway. At that point, millennial movements often materialize in search of a new society. Burridge defines them as new cultures or social orders coming into being. Rather than “oddities” or “diseases in the body social,” they involve “the adoption of new assumptions, a new redemptive process, a new political-economic framework, a new mode of measuring the man, a new integrity, a new community: in short, a new man.” In the third and final phase, the new rules solidify as the new culture takes shape, which in time may represent the old rules and old order for a future prophetic movement. Millenarians cannot last as millenanans. They endure only as they scuttle or transform their millenarian outlook.

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

It is possible to be so familiar with a subject that one no longer sees its peculiar features. Roger Fry, the English art critic, spoke of a specialization of vision that prevents us from observing familiar objects around us until artists awaken us to the distinctive reality of what we have overlooked by lending us their eyes. Historical discoveries are often very much like an aesthetic awakening. Only a relatively small percentage are prompted by the discovery of wholly new and previously unknown evidence. The great majority are stimulated by fresh insight into evidence so familiar that its significance has been underestimated or disregarded.

Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”

Origen's vocabulary is quite definitely that of an intellectual; it owes little to daily life or to the vernacular of his time.… He seems …to manufacture his own language, often hermetic, abstract, or difficult to understand, the language of a man concerned above all with ideas, somewhat cut off from the real world, and constitutionally separated from concrete realities. Are we wrong in attaching a particular significance to the fact, so characteristic of his passionate idealism as well as of his introversion, that he made himself a eunuch ?

The thirteenth century represents a high point in the establishment of female orders, whose ministry was directed largely at an urban population prone to heresy and undergoing the disruptive transition from pastoral feudalism to nascent capitalism. During this period, more than a quarter of the contemporary saints were women; they identified with all of the new movements which animated the church. Some, continuing the already established tradition of princely veneration, were active in evangelization in the recently Christianized regions of Europe's periphery, like Spain and Poland, through the patronage of charitable institutions and religious houses. The canonization trials of Hedwig of Poland, Elizabeth of Thuringia and Margaret of Hungary all reflect a broadly based constituency including rural and urban, lay and clerical, male and female support Others appealed to a narrower social and geographical audience and ministered to the problems of the urban poor: Sperandea of Cingoli's miraculous cures were performed exclusively on married women of the city and of the adjacent countryside. But the largest number of female saints continued to be cloistered women whose chief accomplishment was the establishment or endowment of a new convent or the foundation of a new female order, usually in association with a male order; for while many such orders began independently, the church feared the consequences of independent female piety and sought to ensure orthodoxy by associating the female houses with a corresponding male order. Nevertheless, while contemporary hagiography continued to be patterned after the stereotypical saints of early Christianity, the character of female piety changed to reflect such dynamic changes within the church as the rise of mendicancy, the transition from rural to urban life, the cult of the Virgin, the rise of national states, the war against heresy, the new emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the political struggles of the papacy.

“Growth is as essential in human personality as it is in a stalk of corn,” wrote the pastor of First Community Church, Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. His remark typified the changes underway in mainline American Protestantism as it digested empiricist theology, Christian realism, psychoanalysis, and world events from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. In those years the terms of discourse about what it takes to make a strong democracy gradually shifted from “character”—the traits, attitudes, or behaviors of an individual that publicly express private conviction—to “personality”—the inner, psychodynamic organization of an individual that expresses itself socially in relation to God and other people. Prominent religious educators debated it; pastoral counselors put it into practice. Popularization of psychotherapy in the denominational presses brought the language of “personality” and the psychological dimension of human existence into the lexicon of the mainline churches by the end of World War II. Earlier in the century in the face of mass immigration America's churches had extolled the merits of “character” and “character education” as the chief way for mediating private conviction and public action that would preserve democracy, but in the late 1930s they sounded this theme in the new key of personality: promoting the inner growth and freedom of each individual would safeguard America from moral decay and totalitarian regimes.

In 407, a tribe of barbarian raiders known as Mazices came sweeping off the Libyan desert and devastated one of the first great centers of Christian monasticism, the settlement of Scetis. Scetis was located in a remote desert valley west of the Nile and had been founded around 330 by one of the pioneers of the monastic movement, Macarius the Egyptian (d. 390). Before the attack, it had enjoyed an international reputation for its ascetic rigor and incisive wisdom. Word of the devastation spread rapidly, even to the Latin West. Augustine knew of it and counted it among the great disasters of the time.2 And when the sack of Rome took place a couple of years later, in 410, one of Scetis's survivors, Abba Arsenius, would link the two events: “The world has lost Rome and the monks have lost Scetis.” Scetis's destruction marked a turning point in the history of early Christian monasticism. The site would be resettled a few years later, and in fact would suffer other barbarian raids, notably in 434, 444, and 570. But after this first one, many of its leading monks dispersed and never returned.

The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently, Native and Christian (1996), edited by James Treat; Native American Religious Identity (1998), edited by Jace Weaver; Sergei Kan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.

In his pamphlet entitled From the First to the Last of the Just, Jean-Paul Lichtenberg concludes a brief history of Jewish-Christian relations with a list of five periods to each of which he assigns a particular quality of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. Of the third period, 1096–1520, marked by the Crusades, the Ghetto and the Inquisition, Lichtenberg remarks,

“the pogroms, the massacres and the persecutions perpetrated on the Jews by Christian hands are the manifestation of a Christian anti-Semitism of the people, fed by harsh and comtemptuous preaching. Doctrinal anti-Judaism had filtered down to the masses and given birth to anti-Semitism. The end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance brought about no changes in this situation. Relations between Christians and Jews are already poisoned and only the coming of the (French) Revolution will bring a change in the situation [emphasis added]. One may qualify the Christian anti-Semitism which prevails during this period as an anti-Semitism of passion based upon religion or, again, as an anti-Semitism of intolerance.”

In that fantastic decade from 1650 to 1660, English saints of every persuasion strove frantically to make the rule of the Lord on earth a political reality. Imbued with a lively apocalyptic hope and enjoying the driving enthusiasm of nascent religions, the left-wing Puritan sects sought to build in England a holy commonwealth that would prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. With the failure of the Barebone Parliament, their most promising opportunity passed by unrealized, but throughout the remainder of the Interregnum, Independents, Baptists, Fifth-Monarchy Men, and various mystical sects continued without abatement their endeavors to transform England into Zion.

When William James long ago characterized the God of the thirteenth-century Cistercian cloister of Helfta, in Saxony, as “full of partiality for his individual favorites,” he might have illustrated his claim with any number of passages from three of the surviving works composed by the nuns of Helfta, the Book of Special Grace, associated with Mechtild of Hackeborn (1241–ca. 1298/99), the Herald of Divine Love, associated with Gertrude of Helfta (1256–ca. 1301/02), and the Spiritual Exercises, written by Gertrude. James drew his readers' attention to the following account from the Herald:

America in 1830 could have taken Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon as portent and symbol. Itself the narrative of an ancient religious migration, the book begot a greater wandering, an epic in-gathering of believers from Europe and the States seeking New Jerusalem on the American frontier. Every Mormon proselyte knew by heart and in his own tongue the words of Father Lehi, refugee from Babylon, American immigrant circa 600 B. C.: “We have obtained a land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands…Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.” That was the book's portent, big with history and promise. America, it said, had always been promises.

There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. This intra-Christian competition did not, however, lead to the contestation of space in the form of processions as it did, for example, in Constantinople. At Rome, intra-Christian competition took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege and occupation. Instead of conquering urban space through processions—impossible as the Roman aristocracy and their patronage of traditional spectacles still dominated and defined the public sphere—Roman Christians resorted to warfare, until the mid-sixth century C.E. when an impoverished aristocracy ceased to lavish its diminished wealth on traditional forms of public display.

Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.

Any consideration of the half-millennium of Western European popular enthusiasm from ca. 1000 to ca. 1500—beginning, say, in 994 at the Council of Anse in Burgundy with the intervention of Abbot Odilo of Cluny in the Peace of God movement, and terminating (again with an arbitrary date) on May 23, 1498, in Florence, with the hanging and burning of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, O.P.—must involve the role of the regular clergy, the professed religious of Latin Christendom. Medieval collective religious enthusiasm, especially when it was not inaugurated by ecclesiastical authority, was often divisive, attracting converts and distracting or repelling others. Monks and friars could not remain indifferent to such movements. For one thing, if their stance was deemed inappropriate, their relationship with the laity (perhaps fellow townsfolk), or the papacy, or their rich and powerful benefactors might be compromised. Nor was their role necessarily that of spectators. Members of the regular clergy sometimes participated in medieval revivals. Possibly still more important is the fact that during most of our period the regulars had the lion's share of chronicling popular enthusiasm. It is in their historical writings that medieval popular religious revivals were mythologized and memorialized. Our view of such movements, therefore, has been shaped by their perceptions and prejudices. Their narratives also provide us with a rich source from which to gauge their interpretations of medieval revivalism. For they make no attempt to conceal their attitudes toward lay enthusiasts—their suspicion, animosity, fear, approbation, sympathy, empathy.

Thirty years ago Alan Heimert published his monumental study of religion's relationship to the American Revolution. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution contradicted the conventional wisdom rooted in Vernon Parrington's 1927 Main Currents of American Thought and implicitly challenged the more recent interpretation put forward by Heimert's own mentor, Perry Miller. Critics responded vigorously, but their reproofs did not foretell the future of Heimert's argument. Indeed, in the past twenty years a cadreof young scholars assumed either his thesis or method and moved the debate toward the personalities and movements Heimert underscored. Some of today's leading scholars who study connections between the revivals and the Revolution pay homage to Heimert's thought in footnotes if not in the texts themselves. Two social/intellectual movements seemingly at cross-purposes, namely Protestant evangelicalism and the new cultural history, rescued Heimert's work from scathing yet well-placed criticisms to establish its assertions as a leading model for understanding religion's role in the American Revolution.