W. Robert Godfrey

And I'm not sure of all the psychology of that, whether it's simply the stability that it seems to bring to life, the practices that are so clear and reassuring.

But this was a religion of tremendous power, but not just a religion.

And that's what we have increasingly learned, I think, recent decades in the West.

It is a religion that is also a culture.

The two are

indistinguishable.

They cannot be separated from one another, and that's why Islam believes that wherever it spreads, it must take not only its religion but its whole set of cultural values and laws, that they are indivisible, the culture and the religion, and they have a strong eschatology.

that where Islam spreads, it will never retreat.

And that's why it's so hard for them to recognize the loss of any land to any other person.

And that's what the West, the Christian West, faced throughout almost all the Middle Ages, as Islam would, in wave after wave, sometime in between, beat against the Christian West.

As some in the West felt, well, the empire seems to be disappearing.

There seems to be a decentralization of civilization occurring.

There does seem to be a loss of some of the old Roman structures of society.

Where can we look for continuity?

Who will provide assurance that things are continuing?

And it was to the papacy that they looked.

In our first lecture, we were looking at the sort of backgrounds of the Middle Ages, the character, the broad character of the Middle Ages.

We tried to set the stage for what we're going to look at in our period that I'm calling the warm-up.

In this lecture, I want to look at two really critically foundational figures for the development of the early Middle Ages, and indeed, in a sense, the whole Middle Ages, one an emperor and one a pope.

And that's sort of appropriate because much of the tension throughout the history of the Middle Ages is tension between pope and emperor.