The Triumph of Christianity
Page 30
THE REASONS FOR CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE
Even if such violence was not planned or executed with consistency and rigor, it did happen. Historians have long puzzled over the reason why. Christianity began with the ethical teachings of Jesus: his followers were to love their neighbors as themselves and turn the other cheek—indeed, to love even their enemies. Christians of the fourth century continued to advocate such principles. Yet sometimes Christians at the highest levels of government, leaders of the church, and uneducated Christian mobs practiced intolerance, occasionally leading to violence. How can it be explained?
It is sometimes argued that violent opposition to the “other” is the inevitable outcome when an exclusivist religion becomes dominant and able to enforce its claims with the arm of the law and violence on the streets.32 There may indeed be some truth in this. Yet it is also important to remember that, as historian Harold Drake in particular has emphasized, even pagans could be intolerant in matters of religion. No exclusivity was needed. Moreover, there were many committed exclusivist Christians, even powerful rulers, bloodied warriors, and ruthless disciplinarians—think Constantine—who tolerated religious differences.33
In reflecting on the appearance of violent intolerance in some Christian circles, it may be helpful to consider again a key aspect of religion in antiquity, whether pagan or Christian. Then as now, one principal reason people engaged in religious practices was to please God in order to merit divine benefaction. For pagans, adhering to the ancestral traditions of worship was pleasing to the gods and could lead to the benefits needed to live and, if all went to plan, live well, with good health, plentiful crops, and a loving partner at one’s side. Failing to please the gods, on the other hand, could lead to disaster. It was just this logic that led to the some of the Christian persecutions, coming to a head first with Decius and Valerian but then more dramatically under Diocletian. The gods expected sacrifices and anyone who refused to perform them was a danger to the community.
Christians too shared this logic, but for them the stakes were even higher. For one thing, anyone who did not adopt their particular set of beliefs and practices would be in danger of incurring divine anger not only in the present but also in the afterlife. Unrepentant pagans were destined to roast in hell forever. It mattered that they be persuaded to follow the Christian religion. Indeed, it mattered for the whole world, since in the near future the corrupt kingdoms of earth were to be replaced by the earthly Kingdom of God. This world transformation was to be inaugurated by believers in the present. Christians had sacred Scriptures ordering them to oppose all other religious traditions and practices, to convert nonbelievers by force if necessary. Some Christians took these injunctions literally. The options were clear: Were they to do what God commanded or not?
One other unique feature of this Christianity led to the rise of intolerance: its heightened emphasis on true knowledge. Unlike other religions, Christianity was not principally just a set of religious practices such as baptism, the Eucharist, the reading of Scripture, prayer, and worship. It was also a matter of proper belief. Ultimately, eternally, it mattered what people acknowledged to be true. These beliefs were in the process of refinement in their minute details, and according to some Christian leaders the least variation from correct doctrine could lead to eternal damnation. Doctrines had eternal consequences, doctrines involving the question of whether there was once a time before which the Son of God existed or not, whether Christ had a human spirit or a divine spirit, or whether the power of all evil, Satan, would at the end of time be converted to the truth. Christians had various views of such things, but one thing most of the varying views shared was the sense that getting the answers wrong could have eternal consequences.
Because of the enormous significance of “right belief” for eternal life, the intolerant potential of this exclusivist religion came to be fanned into white-hot passion early on, leading to widespread though certainly not universal intolerance. Wrong belief was so dangerous it could not be tolerated. We see Christian intolerance as early as the writings of the New Testament and continuing on down to the fourth century. It was directed against the “other,” whomever that was: Jew, pagan, or even Christian.
As with all things Christian, in some sense it started with Jesus himself. In line with other Jews of his day, the historical Jesus was convinced that other interpretations of the Jewish religion were flawed. During his public ministry he could scarcely tolerate some of his enemies among the Pharisees. The hostile comments he directs toward them in Matthew 23 are probably Matthew’s own formulations, but they almost certainly reflect Jesus’s sense that the Pharisees were both wrong and wrongheaded. That intolerance grew with the passing of time, and the Gospels came to portray a Jesus who was even less forgiving of the views of his enemies. Particularly severe is the polemic in the Gospel of John, where Jesus regularly confronts enemies who are simply categorized as “the Jews” as if including all of them. At one point he declares that “the Jews” are not the children of God but offspring of Satan, murderers and liars (John 8:42– 44).
The anti-Judaism grew with the passing of time. The author of the early-second-century letter of Barnabas indicates that Jews never were the people of God because they broke the covenant of God as soon as he made it with them, when, because of Israel’s apostasy, an angry Moses smashed the clay tablets containing the Ten Commandments. As a result, Barnabas indicates, Jews never understood their own Scriptures, coming up with ridiculous literalistic interpretations of commandments (such as not eating pork) that were meant to be interpreted figuratively (they were not to behave like pigs). The Old Testament, for Barnabas, was a Christian book, not a Jewish one.
By the end of the second century we have even more vitriolic charges, none more gripping than what is found in a sermon preached by a bishop of Asia Minor named Melito of Sardis, who claimed that since Jesus was God, and the Jews executed him, the Jews had killed their own god. Jews were not simply Christ killers. They were God killers. By the fourth century, Christians in charge of the empire began acting out this hateful intolerance of Jews, leading to the ugly history of Christian anti-Judaism still seen in parts of the world today.
It is almost certainly because Christianity emerged out of Judaism that the earliest expressions of Christian antagonism were leveled at fellow Jews. But it was not long before hatred of all that was pagan followed suit. The New Testament itself attests to the belief that when Jesus returns in glory for his second coming, he will not come meekly. On the contrary, he will return from heaven with “his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of the Lord Jesus. They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction” (2 Thessalonians 1:7–9). It will not be a pretty sight.
Still, for those who want to see the sight, there is always the book of Revelation. Anyone who insists that “the Old Testament God is a God of wrath, but the New Testament God is a God of mercy” has never read, or at least hearkened to, the final book of the Christian canon. Pagans will spend eternity in a lake of fire for their failure to believe in Jesus, with no hope of redemption.
For anyone who wants more variety in the eternal torments of the damned, the later Apocalypse of Peter, already discussed, provides numerous scenarios described with scarcely disguised excitement. One thinks again of Tertullian’s Schadenfreude at seeing his enemies tormented for all eternity, including the persecutors of Christians to be seen eternally “liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against Christians” (On the Spectacles 30).
Most striking of all, from the outset Christians despised and rejected members of their own Christian communities who did not toe the theological line. We find a steady dose of intolerance already in our earliest Christian author, Paul, who curses anyone—human or angel—who dares to proclaim a gospel message different from the one he himself preached (Galatians 1:8–9). This is a real divine curse, a declaration of eternal da
mnation, delivered in this particular case to anyone who thinks that when people believe in Jesus they need also to follow God’s commandment to be circumcised.
Such Christian intolerance is not restricted to Paul but is found throughout the pages of the New Testament. Near its chronological end is the first letter of John, written by an unknown author incensed at members of his own community because they think that Christ was so much a divine being that he could not be fully human like the rest of us. It may not seem like an unreasonable view—it is one that lots of Christians have had over the years—but the author condemns it and those who hold it, calling them not only bald-faced liars but “anti-Christs.” No salvation for them!
After the New Testament we find one writing after another, in one genre after another, filled with vitriol against those Christians who take a theological view out of line with the author’s own. Another apocalyptic vision of the torments of the damned, this one allegedly granted to the apostle Paul, itemizes an entire range of Christians who either misbehaved or misbelieved and so are subject to torments as horrific as anything to be suffered by the rankest pagan. The worst—“seven times greater” than any other torture—is reserved for theologians who propounded an understanding of Christ that the author deemed unorthodox, saying “that the bread and cup of the Eucharist of blessing are not the body and blood of Christ” (Apocalypse of Paul 41). Eucharistic theology is more important, apparently, than believing in Christ or being a good person.
THE LOGIC OF LEGISLATION
We have seen that opposition to pagans came to manifest itself in actual state legislation, and so it should be no surprise to find laws passed against Jews as well. Already under Constantine any Jew who attacked one of their own for converting to Christianity was to be burned to death (Theodosian Code 16.8.1). Constantius decreed that any Christian who converted to Judaism was to have his property entirely confiscated (Theodosian Code 16.8.8). Under Theodosius I it was declared that any Christian who married a Jew would be guilty of the crime of adultery. In the early fifth century, Jews were deprived of the right to serve in the imperial service. Later it became illegal for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue.34
On the other hand, it should be noted that a number of laws were issued to preserve the rights of Jews in the empire. (See the Theodosian Code 8.8.) That cannot be said of heretics. They were roundly condemned. All heretics of every type—that is, anyone not subscribing to the creed of Nicaea—were proscribed by Theodosius (Theodosian Code 16.5.5). They were forbidden to have any meeting places (Theodosian Code 16.5.6). Eventually they were to be “expelled from the cities and driven forth from the villages” (Theodosian Code 16.5.20). They were to be sought out in all places and forced to return to their countries of origin (Theodosian Code 16.5.12). In sum, anyone who did not subscribe to the “apostolic discipline and the evangelic doctrine” that promoted the theologically correct understanding of the Trinity (this would include Arians of various kinds) was legally pronounced “demented and insane” and was to “be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with the divine judgment” (Theodosian Code 16.1.2).
To understand the implicit logic behind the violent intolerance of pagans, it is useful to consider the logic made explicit here in the intolerance of heretics. They were enemies of God, and he would judge them. Since he would judge them at the end, it is the duty for Christians in power to judge them in the meantime. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to pagans. Such is the view set forth in the urgent injunctions of Firmicus Maternus to the emperors Constantius II and Constans: it is God’s will that pagans be slaughtered.35
This in itself may explain many of the acts of Christian intolerance toward pagans and their religion, but a recent proposal has been put forth by historian Harold Drake to explain the upsurge in violence toward the end of the fourth century, after the attempt of Julian the Apostate to push his apostasy on the rest of the empire. It is to be recalled that Julian refused to martyr Christians for their faith, but he did make life increasingly difficult for them. There is no telling what might have happened had he not made some bad military decisions and been killed in battle just nineteen months into his reign. What if he had ruled for nineteen years instead? Or over thirty, as did his uncle Constantine? Would his anti-Christian measures have become more pronounced? Would they have taken a drastic toll on the Christian church? Would they have reversed the trend and produced a massive return to the traditional religions throughout the empire? Could the empire have again become overwhelmingly pagan?
Drake is less concerned about answering such questions than he is about suggesting that Christians after Julian’s death probably asked them. Christianity had been surging rather dramatically, with a series of Christian rulers in Constantine’s wake. Then Julian came along, an anti-Christian pagan with ultimate power. Luckily for the church, he died young. Still, what if another pagan emperor were to come along, and then another? According to Drake’s theory, the Christians who came after Julian, especially the emperor Theodosius I, were bound and determined not to let that happen. Paganism could not be left alone to die a natural death. It had to be attacked and killed.
As a result, Julian’s efforts to promote paganism in the end led to its relatively quick demise. In Drake’s words: “Ironically, this analysis means that Julian was the trigger, not for a pagan offensive, but a Christian one.”36
PLEAS FOR TOLERANCE
Christians who experienced persecution in the years before the conversion of Constantine sometimes pled with their pagan opponents to show toleration. The second- and third-century apologist Tertullian in particular advocated freedom of religion. As he wrote to Scapula, the governor of Carthage: “It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that everyone should worship according to his own convictions: one person’s religion neither harms nor helps another. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion . . . . You will render no real service to your gods by compelling us to sacrifice” (To Scapula 2). Elsewhere he urges his pagan opponents not to violate human freedom “by taking away religious liberty, and forbidding free choice of deity . . . . Not even a human being would care to have unwilling homage rendered him” (Apology 24).
These pleas fell on deaf ears. Years later, when the tide had turned and Christians were in power, sometimes intent on using that power to coerce pagans into leaving their traditional religions, it was pagan intellectuals who pled for tolerance. The great rhetorician Themistius (317–88 CE) played a prominent role in Roman government for more than thirty years, from the reign of Constantius II into that of Theodosius. In addition to being a trusted advisor to Christian emperors, Themistius was also an outspoken pagan who advocated freedom of religion.
Among Themistius’s surviving orations is one delivered on January 1, 364, on the occasion of Jovian’s accession to the imperial throne. The empire had just seen its final pagan emperor. Themistius, of course, had no way of knowing that. But he did know that Jovian was a Christian and that anti-pagan measures might well be in the offing. His oration was, in part, designed to forestall any such unhappy event. In it Themistius points out that the new emperor must know “that a king cannot compel his subjects in everything, but that there are some matters which have escaped compulsion and are superior to threat and injunction, for example, the whole question of virtue, and, above all, reverence for the divine” (Oration 5.67b–c).37 In other words, an emperor cannot expect to legislate either virtue or proper religion.
Themistius argues that everyone has a natural desire to be pious, but it is important to allow “the manner of worship depend on individual inclination” (Oration 5.68a). Torture cannot change a person’s views of the divine or of how to worship. Nor is there only one path to truth. Instead, religions are like a race in which various competitors all head toward the judge, but by different routes. By the rules of this hypothetical race, such varieties are allowed, even if some routes are
more direct and better than others: “Thus you realize that, while there exists only one Judge, mighty and true, there is not one road leading to him.”
This plea for tolerance came to be repeated by other pagans in the years that followed. A particularly important occasion came when the young Christian emperor Gratian removed the altar of the goddess Victory from the Roman senate house in 382 CE. This altar had stood in the senate for more than four centuries, installed there by Caesar Augustus himself early in his reign. Traditionally senators performed a simple sacrifice to Victory upon entering the chamber to assure the success of their endeavors. By the end of the fourth century, Christian senators, of course, would not perform the sacrifice. Under pressure from Christian leaders, Gratian ordered the removal of the altar, much to the consternation of pagan traditionalists who saw this as one more attempt to infringe on their customary religious practices.
Most outspoken was a Roman statesman, orator, and intellectual named Symmachus. After Gratian passed from the scene, Symmachus delivered an address for the new emperor, Valentinian II, pleading that the altar be replaced. Symmachus pointed out that the ancient religious customs of the Romans had long put them in good stead: “This worship subdued the world.” Even if others chose a different religious path, there should be freedom of worship, not constriction. All should worship according to the dictates of their own conscience: “It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What differences does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road” (Relatio 3, par. 10).38