Miss Buddha

by Ulf Wolf

  Ever since the 1st century the expectations of a soon-to-be-here Judgment Day have ebbed and flowed, at times reaching fever pitch and at others receding to an acceptance of the world just like it is, the end well beyond the horizon.

  History

  Virtually all that we know about Jesus of Nazareth himself and about early Christianity originates with those who claimed to be his followers, and because they wrote in order to persuade non-believers rather than to satisfy historical curiosity, their information often raises more questions than it answers.

  Consequently, no scholar has ever succeeded in auditing and harmonizing all such sources into a coherent and completely satisfying chronological account.

  In fact, due to the nature of these sources, it is, for practical purposes, impossible to distinguish between the original teachings of Jesus himself—what the historical person actually said—and the teachings about what he said now sprouting in the various early Christian communities; for it is so easy to put persuasive words in someone’s historical mouth, especially since he or she is no longer around to keep you honest.

  What is known, however—what is regarded as fact—is that the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth soon attracted a following of those who believed him to be a new prophet; and the recollections of his words and deeds, transmitted to posterity through those who eventually composed the Gospels, view Jesus’ days on earth in the light of events (miracles) such as his resurrection from the dead on the first Easter.

  And so, these followers concluded that what he had shown himself to be through his resurrection, he must have already been at the time when he walked the Earth—and, indeed, must have been even before he was born of Mary, in the very being of God from eternity.

  The authors of the Gospels then proceeded to draw upon the language of their existing Scriptures (i.e., the Hebrew Bible, which Christians came to call the Old Testament) to account for the reality they had observed as the apostles of Jesus Christ.

  Believing, further, that it had been Jesus’ will and command that they congregate into a new community—as the redeeming remnant of the people of Israel—these Jewish Christians came to form the original Christian church in Jerusalem.

  And there it was that they believed themselves to receive His promised gift of the Holy Spirit and of a new, and holy, power.

  The Beginnings of the Church

  It could well be said that Jerusalem was the birthplace of the Christian movement, and remained its foundation at least until the city was destroyed by Rome in 70 CE; a locus from which Christianity was soon to radiate to other cities and towns in Palestine and beyond.

  At first, Christianity’s appeal was mostly confined to the adherents of Judaism, to whom it presented itself as a revival—though not in the sense of novel and brand-new, but in the sense of taking a new view on fulfilling what God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

  Thus, from its very formation, Christianity manifested a dual relation to the Jewish faith: one of continuity and one of fulfillment. Above all, the presence of so many elements of Judaism in the Christian Bible has acted to remind Christians that he whom they worshiped as their Lord was himself a Jew, and that the New Testament did not stand on its own but was based on and appended to the Old.

  However, in the 2nd Century CE, Christians with Gentile backgrounds began to outnumber Jewish Christians; clearly, the work of the apostle Paul was influential.

  Born a Jew, Paul was deeply involved in the destiny of Judaism, but as a result of his experience and conversion, he believed that he was the “chosen instrument” to bring the message of Christ to the Gentiles.

  And so, he was to formulate—in his Epistles (letters of instruction) to several early Christian congregations—many of the ideas and terms that were to constitute the core of Christian belief; and for that he certainly deserves the title of the “first Christian theologian.” Most, if not all, theologians who came after him were to base their concepts and systems on his Epistles, by now collected and codified in the New Testament.

  From these Epistles and from other sources during the first two centuries after Jesus’ birth, it is possible to deduce how the early congregations were organized.

  The Epistles to Timothy and to Titus—both apparently written by Paul, although many biblical scholars now find his authorship of these letters implausible—show the beginnings of an organization based on an orderly transmission of leadership from the generation of the first apostles to subsequent “bishops.”

  However, the rather fluid and interchanging use of terms such as bishop, presbyter, and deacon in these documents makes it impossible to discern a single and uniform policy, and it was not until the 3rd century that we saw widespread agreement about the authority of the “bishop” as the link with the apostles. The bishop was, however, to constitute such a link only if he adhered to the teaching of the apostles as this was laid down in the New Testament and in the Catechism (“Deposit of Faith”) as promulgated by the apostolic churches.

  Councils and Creeds

  However, as various versions of the Catechism began to show signs of varied and personal interpretations, it was deemed necessary to clarify such deposits of faith to ensure uniformity throughout the still fledgling church.

  The most important of these deviations—soon to be termed heresies—concerned the person of Christ. Some theologians sought to protect his holiness by denying that his humanity was like that of other human beings, while others sought to protect the monotheistic faith by making Christ a lesser divine being than God the Father.

  (Note, that no one consulted Christ, or the Father in these matters of deposit-of-faith interpretation).

  In response to these two tendencies, early creeds began the process of defining the divine in Christ, both in relation to the divine in the Father and in relation to the human in Christ. The definitive formulations of these relations took form in a series of official church councils during the 4th and 5th centuries—notably the one at Nicaea in 325 and the one at Chalcedon in 451—which outlined the doctrines of the Trinity and of the two natures of Christ in a form still accepted by most Christians.

  In order to establish these formulations, Christianity had to refine both its thought and language, and in this process created a philosophical theology—both in Greek and in Latin—that was to be the dominant intellectual system of Europe for more than a thousand years.

  The principal architect—some say founding father—of the Western Christian theology was Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose literary output, including the classic Confessions and The City of God, did more than any other body of writings, except for the Bible itself, to shape that system.

  Persecution

  First, however, Christianity had to sort out its relation to the political order of the day (aka Rome). Initially, as a Jewish sect, as far as the Roman Empire was concerned, it was just another flavor of Judaism; but before the death of Emperor Nero in 68 CE it had already been singled out as its own freestanding religion, and declared an enemy to Rome.

  The grounds for Roman hostility toward the Christians were not uniform throughout the Empire, and opposition and persecution of the fledgling movement was more often than not a local matter.

  However, the loyalty of Christians to “Jesus as Lord,” was irreconcilable with the worship of the Roman emperor as “Lord,” and those emperors, such as Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, who were the most deeply committed to unity and reform were also the ones who recognized the Christians as a threat to their take on things and who therefore undertook to eliminate this threat.

  But, as in the history of other religions—especially Islam—overt and official opposition to the faith only managed to produce a result exactly opposite to the one intended and, in the epigram of the North African church father Tertullian, the “blood of the martyrs” became the “seed of the church.”

  Thus, by the beginning of the 4th century, Christianity had grown so much both in size and in strength that it had t
o be eradicated once and for all, or accepted—no middle ground here, it was one or the other.

  Emperor Diocletian tried Plan A (eradication) and failed; Constantine the Great went with Plan B, converted to the new religion and so (overnight) created a Christian empire.

  Official Acceptance

  The conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity assured the church a privileged place in society, and it soon grew easier to be a Christian than not to be one. As a result, the more devout Christians perceived that the standards of Christian conduct were being lowered (to accommodate the masses) and that the only way to obey the moral imperatives of Christ was to flee the world (and the church that was in the world, perhaps even of the world) and to follow the full-time calling of Christian discipline as a monk.

  Thus, from its early beginnings in the Egyptian desert—with the hermit Saint Anthony—Christian monasticism spread to many parts of the Christian empire during the 4th and 5th centuries.

  And not only in Greek and Latin portions of the Roman empire, but even beyond its eastern borders, far into Asia, Christian monks devoted themselves to prayer, asceticism, and service.

  In fact, these early monks were to become, during the Byzantine and medieval periods, the most powerful single force in the conversion and Christianization of nonbelievers, in the renewal of worship and preaching, and in theology and scholarship.

  The fact is that most Christians today owe their Christianity to the work of monks.

  Eastern Christianity

  One act with far-flung Christianity repercussions was Constantine the Great’s decision in 330 CE to move the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to the “New Rome,” the city of Byzantium at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

  This new capital, then named Constantinople after Constantine (though now known as İstanbul), also became the intellectual and religious focus of Eastern Christianity.

  While Western Christianity grew increasingly centralized—taking the shape of a pyramid with the pope in Rome as its apex—the principal centers of the East, that is: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, all developed and grew independently of each other.

  This independence gave Eastern liturgy and theology a quality that Western observers, even in the Middle Ages, came to characterize as mystical—a quality enhanced by the strongly Neoplatonic strain in Byzantine philosophy.

  Western versus Eastern Christianity

  Several distinctive features of the Christian East contributed to its growing alienation from its Western sister: the lack of a centralized authority; the close tie to the Byzantine Empire; the mystical and liturgical tradition; the continuity with Greek language and culture; all of which finally produced the East-West schism.

  Historians have often dated the schism from 1054, when Rome and Constantinople exchanged excommunications, but much can be said for fixing the date at 1204 instead, for in that year, the Western Christian armies—on their way to wrest the Holy Land from the grip of the Turks—actually (and under what pretext one wonders) attacked and ravaged the Christian city of Constantinople.

  However, whichever date we choose, the separation of East and West has since continued and it exist even today, despite repeated attempts at reconciliation.

  The Slavs

  One particular point of controversy between Constantinople and Rome was the evangelization of the Slavs, beginning in the 9th century. Although several Slavic tribes—Poles, Moravs, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Slovenes—eventually landed in the orbit of the Western church, the vast majority of Slavic peoples became followers of the Eastern Christian tradition.

  From its early foundations in Kyiv, Ukraine, this Slavic Orthodoxy then permeated Russia, where the features of Eastern Christianity outlined above took perhaps its firmest hold.

  Western Christianity

  Although Eastern Christianity was in many ways a more direct heir to the early church, some of the most dynamic development in the Christian religion took place in the western part of the Roman Empire.

  Two closely related forces lie behind these developments, and deserve particular mention: the growth of the (power of the) papacy and the migration of the Germanic peoples.

  Once Constantine had moved the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople, the most powerful force now remaining in Rome was its bishop.

  Rome, which could trace its Christian faith to the apostles Peter and Paul and which repeatedly acted as arbiter of orthodoxy when other centers—including, interestingly, Constantinople—fell into heresy or schism, was the capital of the Western church, and it continued to hold this position even when the succeeding waves of Germanic tribes, in what used to be called the “barbarian invasions,” swept into Europe.

  Conversion of these invaders to Catholic Christianity meant at the same time their incorporation into the institution of which the bishop of Rome was the head; a fact which the conversion of the king of the Franks, Clovis I, well illustrates.

  As the political power of Constantinople over its western provinces continued to decline, several separate Germanic kingdoms were created, and finally, in 800, an independent Western “Roman empire” was born when Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.

  Thus, Western medieval Christianity, unlike its Eastern counterpart, was a single entity, or strove to be one. When a Western tribe became Christian it learned Latin and often, as in the case of both France and Spain, lost its own language in the process. Latin, the language of ancient Rome, thus became the liturgical, literary, and scholarly speech of western Europe Christianity.

  Papal Power

  Archbishops and abbots, although wielding great power in their own fiefdoms, were—at least on paper, and despite his frequent inability to enforce his claims—subordinate to the pope.

  Theologically, the long shadow of Saint Augustine continued to dominate and by the middle ages there was little independent access to the (now often deemed heretical) speculations of the ancients.

  The spirit of cooperation between church and state, symbolized by the pope’s coronation of Charlemagne, did not mean that no conflict existed between them in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, and not surprisingly—we’re dealing with humans, after all—they clashed repeatedly over the delineation of their respective spheres of authority.

  The most persistent source of such clashes was the right of the sovereign to appoint bishops in his realm—known as lay investiture—which eventually came to a head and brought Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to a deadlock in 1075.

  Wielding his Christian sword, the pope excommunicated the emperor, while the emperor flatly refused to acknowledge Gregory as pope. They were temporarily reconciled when Henry subjected himself in penance to the pope at Canossa in 1077, but the tension was never truly resolved.

  A similar issue was at stake in the excommunication of King John of England by Pope Innocent III in 1209, which ended with the king’s submission to the pope four years later.

  The basis of these disputes was the complex involvement of the church in feudal society. Bishops and abbots administered a great deal of land and other wealth and constituted, consequently, a major economic and political force, over which the king had to exercise some control if he was to assert his authority over his secular nobility.

  On the other hand, the papacy could not afford to let a national church become the puppet of a political regime.

  The Crusades

  There is, however, nothing like a common foe to close ranks, and the Church and State did exactly that when joining forces during the crusades.

  The Muslim conquest of Jerusalem meant that the holy places associated with the life of Jesus were now under the control of a non-Christian power; and even though the reports of interference with Christian pilgrims were often highly exaggerated, the conviction grew that it was the will of God for Christian armies to liberate the Holy Land.

  As of the First Crusade (1095), the campaigns of liberation did manage to establ
ish a Latin patriarchate in Jerusalem; but a century later Jerusalem had returned to Muslim rule, and within 200 years the last Christian outpost had fallen.

  In this sense the Crusades were a failure, or even—in the case of the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204—a disaster. They did not permanently restore Christian rule to the Holy Land, and they did not unify the West either ecclesiastically or politically.

  Philosophical Advancements

  A more impressive achievement of the medieval church during the period of the Crusades was the development of Scholastic philosophy and theology.

  Building as always on the foundations of the musings of Saint Augustine, Latin theologians turned their attention to the relation between the knowledge of God attainable by unaided human reason and the knowledge communicated by revelation.

  Saint Anselm took as his motto “I believe in order that I might understand” and based on that proceeded to construct a proof for the existence of God based on the structure of human thought itself—the ontological argument.

  At about the same time, Peter Abelard was examining the contradictions between various strains in the doctrinal tradition of the church, hoping to develop methods of harmonization.

  These two (major philosophical) tasks dominated the thinking of the 12th and 13th centuries, until the recovery of the lost works of Aristotle made available a set of definitions and distinctions that could be applied to both.

  The philosophical theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas sought to do justice to the natural knowledge of God while at the same time exalting the revealed knowledge in the gospel, and so wove the disparate parts of the tradition into a unified whole. Together with such contemporaries as Saint Bonaventure, Aquinas represents the intellectual ideal of medieval Christianity.