Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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Pagan converts brought with them into the church their superstitions and behavior.
This is evident in many instances, starting with Clovis himself. Jesus was for him a tribal war-god. The Franks especially admired St. Peter, whose noblest exploit in their eyes was his eagerness to wield his sword to protect the Lord Jesus and to slice off the ear of the high priest’s servant. This admiration for militant religion is also reflected in St. George, a military saint who became the patron of England, and St. James, the patron saint of Christian Spain in the struggle against Islam.
Presumably the monastic community, maintaining itself on the land, fitted the agricultural communities of the Celts better than the parish-church system so common in the Roman Empire.
Arius’s doctrine spread among them from the time in the fourth century when Arianism was strong in the empire. This Arianism, however, was more ecclesiastical than theological, because the Germans were not interested in the niceties of abstract theology. Their Christ was the firstborn creature. They tended to think of him as a glorified warlord. But the main difference between the Arians and the orthodox in the West lay in the structure of the church. The Arians had no ecclesiastical center. They did not recognize orthodox Rome, and they had no counterpart of their own. Their churches belonged to the clan. Even after the conversion of these Arian Germans to orthodoxy, they were still loath to accept centralized church authority through Rome.
To counter Alaric’s threat to Italy, the Romans had withdrawn most of their troops from the Rhine frontier in 406 and from Britain the following year. The momentous consequence of this action was a flood of Germanic tribes across the defenseless frontiers. The Vandals pushed their way through Gaul to Spain and, after pressure from the Visigoths, moved on to Africa. In 455 a Vandal raiding force sailed over from Africa, and Rome was sacked a second time.
Terrified at the prospect of conquest by the advancing Huns, the Visigoths (or West Goths) petitioned the Romans to allow them to settle as allies inside the empire. Rome granted the request, and in 376 the entire tribe crossed the Danube into Roman territory. Shortly, however, corrupt Roman officials mistreated the Visigoths, and the proud barbarians went on a rampage. The inept Eastern emperor Valens tried to quell them, but in 378 he lost both his army and his life in the battle of Adrianople (in today’s Turkey).