St. Bridget of Sweden and northern European Christianity

Today's feast: St. Bridget of Sweden (1302/3-1373). Not a bad one to follow St. Mary Magdalene, as this is another woman of God who attained a remarkable intimacy with Christ. As a mystic, she is probably best known for her visions and revelations of the Passion of Jesus Christ and of the hidden life of the Virgin Mary. Quite impressive given that she was also a devoted wife and mother, and a Scandinavian princess to boot. All this just two centuries before northern Europe turned Protestant.

As I have pointed out to some folks who have had the benefit of my insight, the whole Protestant Reformation was essentially an ethno-linguistic revolt against the Catholic clerical authority of the Latin Mediterranean by Germanic northern Europe, including the British Isles and Scandinavia: it ultimately has its origins in the stunning annihilation of three Roman legions by Gothic tribesmen at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 14 AD. That battle effectively split Europe - to this very day - between the Romance (i.e. Latin-derived) and Germanic languages. English is actually the marriage of both groups: the vernacular is Germanic (primarily via the Saxons), the literary is Romance (via Norman-French). This is partly why modern English is such a versatile tongue: it is singularly adaptable, given its dual origin.

Where the Caesars failed, the Popes who supplanted them as masters of Rome succeeded: they brought Germanic northern Europe under the rule of the Roman Catholic Church from the 6th to 9th centuries AD. They accomplished this primarily by the conversion of nobles and princes whom they anointed as kings and, beginning with Charlemagne in 800 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor of central and western Europe. Thus they established the symbiosis between spiritual and secular power that would characterize medieval west European Christendom, which closely resembled a parallel arrangement in eastern Christianity, with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

St. Bridget, then, is one of the crowns of medieval Christendom, coming as she did in the High Middle Ages, circa 14th century, when Europe was at the junction between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Being a Germanic northern European, she was part of a culture that had originally adopted Catholic religious and social customs from the Mediterranean, but which had caught on very quickly in the preceding centuries to contribute disproportionately to the overall richness of Catholic theology and spirituality, primarily through its advanced literary development. The medieval Church in England, for one, was notable for its erudition.

Not surprisingly, it was this higher literacy - in both quantity and quality - that would soon empower Germanic northern Europe to pull off a spiritual Teutoburg Forest against Rome: the Reformation of Martin Luther, which began with his 95 Theses in 1517.