Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Many Christians had been confused by the creed of Nicaea. If there was only one God, how could Jesus be divine? Did that mean that there were two gods? And was there a third: What was the “holy spirit,” which had been dealt with so perfunctorily in Athanasius’s creed? In the New Testament this Jewish term had referred to the human experience of the power and presence of the divine, which could never measure up to the divine reality itself. The Trinity was an attempt to translate this Jewish insight into a Hellenistic idiom. God, the Cappadocians explained, had one divine, inaccessible essence (ousia) that was totally beyond the reach of the human mind, but it had been made known to us by three manifestations (hypostases): the Father (source of being), the Logos (in the man Jesus), and the Spirit that we encounter within ourselves. Each “person” (from the Latin persona, meaning “mask”) of the Trinity was merely a partial glimpse of the divine ousia that we could never comprehend. The Cappadocians introduced converts to the Trinity in a meditation, which reminded them that the divine could never be encapsulated in a dogmatic formula. Constantly repeated, this meditation taught Christians that there was a kenosis at the heart of the Trinity, because the Father ceaselessly emptied itself, transmitting everything to the Logos. Once that Word had been spoken, the Father no longer had an “I” but remained forever silent and unknowable. The Logos likewise had no self of its own but was simply the “Thou” of the Father, while the Spirit was the “We” of Father and Son.66 The Trinity expressed the paedeia’s values of restraint, deference, and self-abnegation, with which the more aristocratic bishops countered the current Christian stridency. Other bishops, alas, were all too ready to embrace it.

  Constantine had given the bishops new authority for the exercise of imperial power, and some, especially those of humble birth, strove for the episcopate as pugnaciously as politicians compete for parliamentary seats today.67 Some even staged coups, taking over a church by night and barricading the doors during their illegal consecration.68 “At present we have men who claim to be bishops—a lowly breed who are bogged down in acquiring money and military operations and striving for honorable positions,” complained the historian Palladius.69 They became known as “tyrant-bishops.” In ancient Greece, a tyrannos was a strongman who seized power by unlawful violence; in the later Roman Empire, the word had general connotations of misrule, cruelty, and unrestrained anger.70 When Athanasius became a bishop, his opponents regularly called him a tyrant because, they claimed, he was motivated not by the desire to defend the faith but by personal ambition. He was described as “raging like a tyrant” when he sentenced Arians to prison, flogging, and torture, and it was noted that his entourage included “the military and officials of the imperial government.”71 It was clearly easier to imperialize the faith than to Christianize the empire.

  During the late fourth century, rioting had become a regular feature of city life. Barbarian tribes were ceaselessly attacking the frontiers, brigandage was rife in the countryside, and refugees poured into the towns.72 Overcrowding, disease, unemployment, and increased taxes created a tension that often exploded violently, but because the army was needed to defend the borders, governors had no military forces to quell these uprisings and passed the responsibility for crowd control to the bishops.73 “It is the duty of a bishop like you to cut short and restrain any unregulated movements of the mob,” wrote the patriarch of Antioch to a colleague.74 The bishops of Syria already relied on local monks to man their soup kitchens and serve as stretcher-bearers, hospital porters, and gravediggers. They were greatly loved by the people, especially the urban poor, who enjoyed their ferocious denunciations of the rich. Now they began to police the riots and in the process acquired martial skills.

  Unlike Antony’s Egyptian monks, the monks of Syria had no interest in fighting the demon of anger. Known as boskoi, “grazers,” they had no fixed abode but roamed through the mountains at will, feeding on wild plants.75 One of the most famous boskoi was Alexander the Sleepless, who had left a regular community of monks because he disapproved of its property ownership. He had wholly imbibed the post-Julian ethos of “Never again,” and his first act, on emerging from seven solitary years in the desert, was to burn down the largest temple in a pagan village. There could be zero tolerance for the icons of the old religion, which were a standing threat to the security of the Church. Alexander lost out on the palm of martyrdom, however, because he preached so eloquently to the mob that came to kill him that it converted to Christianity on the spot. He founded an order dedicated to “freedom from care,” so instead of working for their living, like Antony, his monks lived on alms, refusing to engage in productive labor. And instead of trying to control their anger, they gave it free rein.76 During the 380s, four hundred of them formed a massive prayer-gang and began a twenty-year trek along the Persian border, singing in shifts all around the clock in obedience to Paul’s instructions to “pray without ceasing.”77 The hapless inhabitants of the villages on either side of the frontier were terrorized as the monks chanted the psalmists’ bloodcurdling denunciations of idolatry. Their insistent begging made them an intolerable burden to these rural communities that could barely support themselves. When they arrived in a city, they squatted in a public space in the center, attracting huge crowds of urban poor who flocked to hear their fiery condemnation of the rich.

  Those who did not feel badgered by them respected the monks for expressing the values of Christianity in an absolute way. For them, Alexander’s virulent intolerance of paganism showed that he really believed that Christianity was the one true faith. After Julian, some Christians increasingly defined themselves as a beleaguered community. They gathered around the tombs of local martyrs, listened avidly to the stories of their suffering, and piously preserved the memory of Julian’s persecution, keeping alive their sense of injury. Many had no time for the courteous tolerance of the more aristocratic bishops.78 The pagan temples, which had symbolized the brief pagan revival, now seemed a standing threat that became increasingly intolerable. To add fuel to these flames, the emperors were now ready to exploit the monks’ popularity and let these zealots loose on the pagan world. They would enforce the Pax Christiana as aggressively as they had previously imposed the Pax Romana.

  Theodosius I (r. 346–95) was a recent convert and a man of humble Spanish origins. A brilliant soldier, he had pacified the Danube region and arrived in Constantinople in 380 determined to implement his bellicose form of Christianity in the East. It was he who summoned the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381. He patronized the Roman aristocracy when it suited him, but his sympathies really lay with the man in the street, and he decided to create a power base by wooing the disaffected townsfolk through their beloved monks. He could see the point of destroying the pagan temples; his empress, Aelia Flacilla, had already distinguished herself in Rome by leading a crowd of noblewomen to attack pagan shrines. In 388 Theodosius gave the monks the go-ahead, and they fell on the village shrines of Syria like a plague; with the connivance of the local bishop, they also destroyed a synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates. The pagan orator Libanius urged the emperor to prosecute this “black-robed tribe” who were guilty of latrocinium (“robbery and violence”), describing the “utter desolation” that followed their vicious attacks on the temples “with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet.” The pagan priests had no option but to “keep quiet or die.”79 The monks became the symbolic vanguard of violent Christianization. The mere sound of their chanting was enough to make the governor of Antioch adjourn his court and flee the city. Even though there were no boskoi on Minorca, the leader of the Jewish community there dreamed in 418 that his synagogue was in ruins and its site occupied by psalm-singing monks. A few weeks later the synagogue was in fact destroyed—though not by monks but by fanatic local Christians.80

  Some bishops opposed this vandalism, but not consistently. Because Roman law protected Jewish pr
operty, Theodosius ordered the bishop who had instigated the burning of the Callinicum synagogue to pay for its repair. But Ambrose (339–97), bishop of Milan, forced him to rescind this decree, since rebuilding the synagogue would be as humiliating to the true faith as Julian’s attempt to restore the Jewish temple.81 The Christianization of the empire was now, increasingly, equated with the destruction of these iconic buildings. In 391, after Theodosius had permitted Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, to occupy the temple of Dionysius, the bishop pillaged all the temples in the city and paraded the looted treasure in an insulting display.82 In response, the pagans of Alexandria barricaded themselves into the magnificent temple of Serapis with some Christian hostages, whom they forced to reenact the trauma of Diocletian’s persecution:

  These they forced to offer sacrifice on the altars where fire was kindled; those who refused they put to death with new and refined tortures, fastening some to gibbets and breaking the legs of others and pitching them into the caverns which a careworn antiquity had built to receive the blood of sacrifices and the other impurities of the temple.83

  When the pagan leader thought he heard monks singing in some distant part of the shrine, he knew they were doomed. In fact, the Serapaeum was destroyed by imperial soldiers acting on the bishop’s orders, but the monks who turned up afterward carrying relics of John the Baptist and squatted in the ruins became the symbols of this Christian triumph.84 It was reported that many pagans were so shocked by these events that they converted on the spot.

  The success of these attacks convinced Theodosius that the best way of achieving ideological consensus in the empire was to ban sacrificial worship and close down all the old shrines and temples. His son and successor, Arcadius (r. 395–408), expressed this policy succinctly: “When [the temples] are overthrown and obliterated, the material foundations for all superstition will have been done away with.”85 He urged local aristocracies throughout the empire to let their zealots loose on the temples to prove that the pagan gods could not even defend their own homes. As one modern historian notes: “Silencing, burning, and destruction were all forms of theological demonstration; and when the lesson was over, monks and bishops, generals and emperors had driven the enemy from the field.”86

  It was Aurelius Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who gave the most authoritative blessing to this Christian state violence. He had found by experience that militancy brought in new converts.87 Writing twenty-five years after agents of the Western emperor Honorius had torn down the temples and idolatrous shrines of Carthage in 399, he asked: “Who does not see how much the worship of the name of Christ has increased!”88 When Donatist monks had raged through the African countryside in the 390s, destroying the temples and attacking the estates of the nobility, Augustine had at first forbidden the use of force against them, but he soon noticed that the stern imperial edicts terrified the Donatists and made them return to the Church. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was Augustine who would develop the “just war” theory, the foundation of all future Christian thinking on the subject.89 When Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek when attacked, Augustine argued, he had not asked them to be passive in the face of wrongdoing.90 What made violence evil was not the act of killing but the passions of greed, hatred, and ambition that had prompted it.91 Violence was legitimate, however, if inspired by charity—by a sincere concern for the enemy’s welfare—and should be administered in the same way as a schoolmaster beat his pupils for their own good.92 But force must always be authorized by the proper authority.93 An individual, even if acting in self-defense, would inevitably feel an inordinate desire (libido) to inflict pain on his assailant, whereas a professional soldier, who was simply obeying orders, could act dispassionately. In putting violence beyond the reach of the individual, Augustine had given the state almost unlimited powers.

  When Augustine died in 430, the Vandals were besieging Hippo. During the last years of his life, one western province after another had fallen to the barbarian tribes, who had set up their own kingdoms in Germany and Gaul, and in 410 Alaric and his Gothic horsemen had sacked the city of Rome itself. In response, Theodosius II (r. 401–50) built a massive fortifying wall around Constantinople, but the Byzantines had long been oriented to the east, were still dreaming of replicating Cyrus’s empire, and were able to survive the loss of old Rome without undue repining.94 Lacking imperial supervision, Western Europe became a primitive backwater, its civilization lost, and for a while it looked as though Christianity itself would perish there. But the Western bishops stepped into the shoes of the departing Roman officials, maintaining a semblance of order in some regions, and the pope, the bishop of Rome, inherited the imperial aura. The popes sent missionaries out to the new barbarian kingdoms who converted the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Franks in the old province of Gaul. Over the coming centuries, the Byzantines would look with increasing disdain on these “barbarian” Christians. They would never accept the popes’ claim that, as the successors of Saint Peter, they were the true leaders of the Christian world.

  In Byzantium the debates on the nature of Christ resumed even more aggressively than before. It might seem that this conflict, which had always expressed itself violently, was caused wholly by religious zeal for correct dogma. The bishops were still searching for a way to express their vision of humanity, vulnerable and moribund as it was, as somehow sacred and divine. But the discussions were fueled in equal measure by the internal politics of the empire. The leading protagonists were “tyrant-bishops,” men with worldly ambitions and huge egos, and the emperors continued to muddy the waters. Theodosius II patronized the lawless monks even more assiduously than his grandfather. One of his protégés was Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, who argued that Christ had two natures, one human and one divine.95 Where the Nicene Creed saw humanity and divinity as entirely compatible, however, Nestorius insisted that they could not coexist. His argument was thoughtful and nuanced, and if the debate had been conducted in a peaceable, open-hearted manner, the issue could have been resolved. However, anxious to curb Nestorius’s rising star, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, vehemently accused him of outright heresy, arguing that when God stooped to save us, he did not go halfway, as Nestorius seemed to suggest, but embraced our humanity in all its physicality and mortality. At the Council of Ephesus (431) that met to decide the issue, each side accused the other of “tyranny.” Nestorius claimed that Cyril had sent a horde of “fanatical monks” to attack him and that he had been compelled to surround his house with an armed guard.96 Contemporary historians had no respect for either side, dismissing Nestorius as a “firebrand” and Cyril as “power-hungry.”97 There was no serious doctrinal conflict, argued Palladius; these men “tore the church asunder” simply “to satisfy their desire for the episcopal office or even the primacy of the episcopate.”98

  In 449 Eutyches, a revered monastic leader in Constantinople, maintained that Jesus had only one nature (mono physis), since his humanity had been so thoroughly deified that it was no longer like our own. He accused his opponents—quite inaccurately—of “Nestorianism.” Flavian, his bishop, tried to settle the matter quietly but Eutyches was a favorite of the emperor and insisted on making a legal case of it.99 The result was a virtual civil war over doctrine, in which emperor and monks formed an unholy alliance against the more moderate bishops. A second council was convened at Ephesus in 449 to settle the “Monophysite” problem, headed by the “tyrant-bishop” Dioscorus, patriarch of Alexandria, who was determined to use the council to establish himself as primate of the Eastern Church. To make matters worse, Theodosius brought the monk Barsauma and his crew to Ephesus, ostensibly to represent “all the monks and pious people of the east” but actually to be his storm troopers.100 Twenty years earlier Barsauma and his monastic thugs had ritually reenacted Joshua’s campaign in Palestine and Transjordan, systematically destroying synagogues and temples at all the holy places along the route, and in 438 they had killed Jewish pilgrims on the T
emple Mount in Jerusalem. “He has sent thousands of monks against us,” his victims complained later; “he has devastated all of Syria; he is a murderer and a slayer of bishops.”101

  When the delegates arrived at Ephesus, they were met by hordes of monks wielding clubs and attacking Eutyches’s opponents:

  They were carrying off men, some of them from the ships and others of them from the streets and others from the houses and others from the churches where they were praying and were pursuing others of them that fled; and with all zeal they were searching out and digging even those who were hiding in caves and in holes of the earth.102

  Hilary of Poitiers, the pope’s envoy, thought he was lucky to get out alive, and Bishop Flavian was beaten so badly that he died shortly afterward. Dioscorus refused to allow any dissenting voice to be heard, doctored the minutes, and called in the imperial troops when it came to the vote.

  The following year, however, Theodosius died, and the monks lost their imperial support. A new council met at Chalcedon in 451 to reverse Second Ephesus and create a neutral theological middle ground.103 The “Tome” of Pope Leo, which declared diplomatically that Jesus was fully God and fully man, now became the touchstone of orthodoxy.104 Dioscorus was deposed, and the roaming Syrian boskoi reined in. Henceforth all monks were required to live and remain in their monastery, forbidden to participate in both worldly and ecclesiastical affairs, and were to be financially dependent on and controlled by the local bishop. But Chalcedon, hailed as the triumph of law and order, was actually an imperial coup. At the beginning of the fourth century, Christians had denounced the presence of imperial troops in their churches as sacrilegious; but after the horror of Second Ephesus, the moderate bishops begged the emperor to take control. Consequently a committee of nineteen of the highest military and civil officials of the empire presided over Chalcedon, set the agenda, silenced dissenting voices, and enforced correct procedure. Henceforth in the Syrian-speaking world, the Chalcedonian Church was known as Melkite—“the emperor’s church.” In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage. Opponents of this imperialized Christianity espoused Eutyches’s Monophysitism in protest. In fact, the theological difference between Monophysites and Nicenes was minimal, but the Monophysites could point to other Christian traditions—not least Jesus’s stance against Rome—to claim that the Melkites had made an unholy alliance with earthly power.