page_title: History of baptism
section_title: Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: History of baptism / Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: Sketch for Vladimir Cathedral fresco
context_page_description: John the Baptist, who is considered a forerunner to Christianity, used baptism as the central sacrament of his messianic movement. Christians consider Jesus to have instituted the sacrament of baptism. The earliest Christian baptisms were probably normally by immersion, though other modes, such as pouring, were used. By the third and fourth centuries, baptism involved catechetical instruction as well as chrismation, exorcisms, laying on of hands, and recitation of a creed. In the West, Affusion became the normal mode of baptism between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, though immersion was still practiced into the sixteenth. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther retained baptism as a sacrament, but Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli considered baptism and the Lord's supper to be symbolic. Anabaptists denied the validity of infant baptism, which was the normal practice when their movement started and practiced believer's baptism instead. Several groups related to Anabaptism, notably the Baptists and Dunkards, soon practiced baptism by immersion as following the Biblical example.
context_section_description: In 895, the provincial Council of Tribur commented on the traditional teaching that the triple immersion in baptism was an imitation of Christ for the three days he spent in the tomb, and the rising from the water an imitation of the resurrection of Jesus. The linking of the baptismal immersion in and rising from the water with the burial and resurrection of Jesus arguably goes back to Saint Paul, and the linking of the triple immersion with the three days in the tomb is found in Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–86) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – after 394).
  The 12th century saw the meaning of the word "sacrament" narrowed down and restricted to seven rites, among them that of baptism, while other symbolic rites came to be called "sacramentals".
  In the period between the 12th and the 14th centuries, affusion became the usual manner of administering baptism in Western Europe, though immersion continued to be found in some places even as late as the 16th century. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was therefore considerable variation in the kind of facility required for baptism, from the baptismal pool large enough to immerse several adults simultaneously of the 13th century Baptistery at Pisa, to the half-metre deep basin in the 6th century baptistery of the old Cologne Cathedral.
  Both East and West considered washing with water and the Trinitarian baptismal formula necessary for administering the rite. Scholasticism referred to these two elements as the matter and the form of the sacrament, employing terms taken from the then prevailing Aristotelian philosophy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, while teaching the necessity of both elements, nowhere uses these philosophical terms when speaking of any of the sacraments.
caption: An 1890 sketch for St. Vladimir's Cathedral, Kiev: The Baptism of Saint Vladimir by Viktor Vasnetsov. Attendants (left) hold Vladimir's golden royal robes, which he has removed, and the simple white baptismal robe, which he will put on.
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