Brett Whalen explores the compelling belief that Christendom would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. During the High Middle Ages—an era of crusade, mission, and European expansion—the Western followers of Rome imagined the future conversion of Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Eastern Christians into one fold of God’s people, assembled under the authority of the Roman Church.

Starting with the eleventh-century papal reform, Whalen shows how theological readings of history, prophecies, and apocalyptic scenarios enabled medieval churchmen to project the authority of Rome over the world. Looking to Byzantium, the Islamic world, and beyond, Western Christians claimed their special place in the divine plan for salvation, whether they were battling for Jerusalem or preaching to unbelievers. For those who knew how to read the signs, history pointed toward the triumph and spread of Roman Christianity.

Yet this dream of Christendom raised troublesome questions about the problem of sin within the body of the faithful. By the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, radical apocalyptic thinkers numbered among the papacy’s most outspoken critics, who associated present-day ecclesiastical institutions with the evil of Antichrist—a subversive reading of the future. For such critics, the conversion of the world would happen only after the purgation of the Roman Church and a time of suffering for the true followers of God.

This engaging and beautifully written book offers an important window onto Western religious views in the past that continue to haunt modern times.

Together with its sequel The Dividing of Christendom, this book was the fruit of the Harvard lectures that Christopher Dawson delivered as the first occupant of the Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies from 1958-1962. Here, as in all his works, he sees religion as the dynamic element of culture. This work traces the formation of Christian culture from its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition through the rise and fall of medieval Christendom, and ends with an epilogue in which the author reflects on the defining characteristics of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. In the introductory section of this work, Dawson highlights the importance of language in the origin and development of civilization. Christina Scott, the author’s daughter and first biographer, summarises Dawson’s ideas on this point in her work A Historian and his World: “In the beginning was the word: language was the gateway to the human world and was the single factor that distinguished man from the animal kingdom.” Language, as Dawson wrote, “enables man to think, to create a new world of imagination and reason.” In parts two and three Dawson traces the beginnings of Christian culture in the first centuries after Christ through to the decline of medieval unity. Some of the tantalizing chapter headings include The Christian and Jewish Idea of Revelation, The Foundation of Europe: The Monks of the West, The Carolingian Age, Feudal Europe and the Age of Anarchy, The Achievement of Medieval Thought, and East and West in the Middle Ages. Dawson shared with Arnold Toynbee the ideal of a universal spiritual society as the goal of history; but whereas Dr. Toynbee saw this as achievable by a consensus of the great world religions, Dawson concludes his work with a clear exposition of the Catholic ideal of a universal spiritual society. It provides an excellent summary of the author’s view of the uniqueness and universality of the Catholic Church, as well as its fundamentally non-sectarian basis. His concluding words demonstrate his commitment to the concept of unity: “On the other hand, if Christianity were to lead the nations still further apart from one another into spiritual disunity, it would defeat the central purpose of the Church’s institution.”

Evangelical criticism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dates back to the earliest days of the Church. Nathaniel Wiewora uses the diverse animus expressed by evangelicals to illuminate how they used an imaginary Church as a proxy to disagree, attack, compromise, and settle differences among themselves. As Wiewora shows, the evangelical practice to contrast itself with the emerging faith not only encompassed but also went beyond religious matters. If Joseph Smith was accused of muddling religious truth, he and his followers also faced accusations of immoral economic practices and a sinful regard for wealth that reflected worries within the evangelical world. Attacks on Latter-day Saints’ emotional religious displays, the Book of Mormon’s authenticity, and the dangerous ideas represented by Nauvoo paralleled similar conflicts. Wiewora traces how the failure to blunt the Church’s success led evangelicals to change their own methods and pursue the religious education infrastructure that came to define parts of the movement.