1. This 6th century began with a Christianity already quite sophisticated. As it had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, it ended up losing the simplicity of the first centuries. There was created a very great distance between the Christianity of the first centuries and the Christianity of this century onward.

2. Christianity suffered very great influences from three peoples. At the beginning, from the Jews. Remembering that Jesus was born Jewish, his apostles were Jewish, He spoke to Jews and He himself had said that he had not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to give fulfillment to it. There was also the hypothesis, at that time, that Christianity would become a current of Judaism. But this did not happen, because, when the Christian message began to spread to other cultures, thanks to Paul of Tarsus, the expressions of Christianity began to distance themselves from the aspects of the Jewish view.

3. In a second moment, the idea of the gentiles joined itself to the Christian thought and, as they were under the aegis of the Roman Empire, their thought was their religious reference. Christianity passed, then, to have powers, to have status. It ended up adopting the customs and the traditions of the Roman culture. The adherents passed to adore images, to venerate saints.

4. After, there were the barbarian invasions, initiated in the previous century. Christianity suffered influence of these peoples, with their exogenous cultures, strange cultures, gods, cults and religious truths unknown until then. With all this, Christianity faced a great challenge: how to shelter all these influences that infiltrated into its core and move forward? How to live with this variety of cultures and religious ideas?

5. Since the first influence, when Christianity ceased to be a branch of Judaism and became effectively a religion, there was resistance on the part of the Christians in relation to all the persecutions that they suffered during three centuries. However, Christianity moved forward, but without the purity of the first times.

6. With the barbarian invasions, Christianity faced another very delicate situation. The barbarian peoples did not know Jesus nor His Gospel. They were very rude peoples, had commitment with their hegemonies, wanted to take new places, implant their dynasties, impose their own customs and beliefs. However, as the force of Christianity was very great, since they had converted even the Roman Empire, there began, in this century, the conversion of the barbarian peoples. “And this was spectacular!”

7. There arises, then, the king of the Franks, Clovis, a striking figure for the propagation of the Christian ideas. The Franks were one of the barbarian peoples, those who were taking great prominence in Europe. It was they who gave origin to France. The very name France comes from Franks. Then, Clovis, the king of the Franks, converted himself to Christianity, married Clotilde in a Christian ritual and determined: “Our people will be Christian”. Thus, the Christian culture was spreading among the barbarian peoples.

8. The barbarian peoples, after bringing down the Roman Empire of the West and disputing its spoils, divided it, each one occupying a part.

9. The Franks were one of these barbarian peoples, who lived in the region where today is Germany. They, then, went to another region called Gaul and there fought against the Gauls. They ended up winning and dominating all the region. And they were so incisive in the domination of that land, that they managed even to change the name of the place: from Gaul to France.

10. Thus, the Franks, with their leader Clovis, converted to Christianity, made the barbarian peoples Christians. And Christianity was growing widely. France was important for the christianization of Europe. If it were not for Clovis, perhaps the barbarian peoples would have taken everything. There, then, already began the preparation of France to receive, further ahead, the professor Allan Kardec, in the 19th century.

11. Historians mention three notable characters for Christianity to exist today: Constantine, who made possible that the Roman Empire become Christian; Clovis, the king of the Franks, for, if it were not for him, perhaps Europe would have become pagan; and Charlemagne, grandson of Charles Martel, who, in 732, in the Battle of Poitiers, prevented that Europe become Muslim. These three characters are responsible for the structure of Christianity.

12. When of the fall of the emperor Romulus Augustus, in 476, historians mark, in this date, the beginning of the Middle Ages, that began with the barbarians and ended in 1453, when the Ottoman Empire overthrew the Roman Empire of the East and took Constantinople. This period is known as the period of the darkness.

13. However, in this period, much good people arose: Boethius and Thomas Aquinas. But it was also a period in which the Christian ideas most distanced themselves from the primitive Christianity.

14. In this century happened the second Council of Constantinople, occurred from May 5 to July 2 of 553, when the great focus was that it was necessary to move away, to end definitively, with the ideas of Origen and his fifteen theses. One of them was the apocatastasis (the final redemption of the spirits). Another thesis of Origen was the palingenesis (the reincarnation). Origen was from Alexandria, studied the Greek culture and the Greeks believed in reincarnation. The ideas of Origen are all reincarnationist.

15. Origen carried inside himself the concepts of the spiritual liberation. He was considered a gnostic. For him, “Jesus is the model, is the guide, He teaches me, but I do not need, necessarily, to accept Him. I need to accept and live the proposals that He brought me”. This, for the Church, was a heresy.

16. Therefore, in this second Council of Constantinople, Origen and his theses were left behind and it was decided, then, that the soul is created in the moment of the conception and that, in the moment of death, there will be a judgment and the fate will be defined.

17. The traditions say the reason why the ideas of Origen were combated. Theodora, the wife of Justinian II, who was the emperor of the Empire of the East, had been a “courtesan”. The people, in that time, believed in reincarnation. Theodora did not like the comments of her numerous “work partners”. They said that, just as an ancient courtesan, that came from an inferior life, had become empress, the same could happen with all of them. Theodora did not accept that they spoke of her past. Then, she ordered to kill all her five hundred “work partners”, former companions of the past, so that there would not remain more comments of this type, about her.

18. As she had ordered to kill her companions so that her story would not propagate itself, the people that believed in reincarnation, began to say that she would have to be reborn various other times to be able to pay for her debts, because, in the reincarnationist belief, if there exists a cause, there must exist an effect. Then, she would bear with the effects of her own sowing. Theodora spoke to the husband, Justinian II, so that he pressure the bishop Virgilius to convene a Council that ended with the doctrine of reincarnation, for she did not like to know that she would be reborn to pay for her debts. And, in a tight voting, the ideas of Origen were removed from the proposal of the Church. From this fact, the Church ceased to be reincarnationist.

19. There arose, in this century, some great religious, that wanted to take the idea of Christianity into the already weakened structure of the Roman Empire of the West. One of them was Gregory, the Great. It was he the great religious of the 6th century, the one that gave great contributions to the Church until the present days. One of them was the Gregorian chant, for, according to him, the best form to praise God was through the chant.

20. The patriarch of the East did not accept Gregory. He said to him that the Empire had fallen and only remained the Byzantine, of the East. Gregory responded: “But the Christianity of the West did not end, we are here”. He named the Christians of the West as being “the servants of the servants of God”.

21. In 591, in one of his preachings, he suggested that Mary of Magdala is the same character present in the Gospel of John, in chapter 8, being the woman caught in adultery and taken to the square to be stoned. In another occasion, he made another hypothesis: that Mary of Magdala would have been that one who washed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair. In face of these interpretations of Gregory, however, theologians of the Catholic Church and of the Protestant Church arrived at different conclusions, being today the dominant opinion that Mary of Magdala is not the woman caught in adultery in chapter 8 of the Gospel of John. They are two different women. As for the woman who washed the feet of Jesus, Mary of Magdala would be that one present in the Gospel of Luke 7. The anointing described in the other Gospels (Matthew, Mark and John) would have been made by another Mary, that of Bethany (dominant current in the days of today). In truth, knowing who is who does not truly free our souls from their imperfections.

22. A curiosity: Mary of Magdala and Mary Magdalene are the same person, because the women of Magdala were known as the magdalenas. With time, the letter “g” fell and remained “the madalenas”.

23. The 6th century is characterized by the apex of the Byzantine Empire of the East, that had as its emperor Justinian, who transformed the city of Constantinople, today Istanbul. There occurred, then, there, a true cultural effervescence, making it a very rich city, of exuberant commerce, with many churches. One in particular became the pearl of the universal architecture: the Church of Hagia Sophia (hagia = holy; sophia = wisdom of God). He erected the church in homage to the Wisdom of God, the Christian Byzantine Church.

24. In 570, the structures of the world began to change, because, in the city of Mecca, Muhammad, the prophet Mohammed, was born. However, his religious importance will be verified in the next century.

25. Boethius, was an important Roman philosopher and theologian, of the beginning of this century. Considered as the great “link” between Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. His thought was that the reason should be together with the religion; there was no way to dissociate faith and reason, science and religion. He wanted to bring Christianity to the north again.

26. We cannot say that the Middle Ages was only the age of darkness, for several important characters arose in this century and brought great contributions to Christianity. However, many persecutions happened, much blood was shed... there was the emergence of the Crusades, of the Inquisition and much intolerance.

27. The divinity never left us alone; there were always people that came to try to bring Christianity to the center, but, unfortunately, the great majority insisted in disturbing themselves.