Ideas

by Peter Watson

  He made other changes. The observation of Sunday became obligatory, at least in cities, and he initiated a fashion for collecting relics, to install in shrines. No less important, he transferred the capital of the empire away from Rome to the new city of Constantinople, which was founded in 330 on the ancient site of Byzantium. This city had once been protected by the goddess Hecate, but Constantine looted pagan shrines in the Aegean to enrich his new base, and had built a massive statue of himself, holding an orb, symbol of world dominion, in which was embedded a fragment of what was claimed to be the True Cross, discovered by his mother.43 Christianity was widely spread by now–as much as half the population in Greece, Turkey (Asia Minor then), Egypt and Edessa (towards Armenia). But it extended, in pockets, to Abyssinia, Spain, Gaul and Persia, to Mauretania in Africa and Britain in the north of Europe. Its success was helped by the fact that its growing confidence enabled it to relax a little and absorb pagan practices where this was felt to serve its interests. Besides the adoption of the feast day of Mithras, 25 December, as the date of the Nativity, the very word ‘epiphany’ was a pagan concept, used when gods or goddesses revealed themselves to worshippers, as often as not in dreams.44 The terms ‘vicar’ and ‘diocese’ were taken from the emperor’s administrative reforms. The original ‘Sunday observance’ was conceived as a day of respect not for Jesus but for the sun. In 326 Constantine gave the shrine of Helios Apollo in Nero’s circus to the Christians for the foundation of their new church of St Peter. The shaven heads of Christian priests were taken from the practices of pagan priests in Egypt and when Mary was first honoured as the Mother of God, at Ephesus in 431, the church dedicated to her was constructed on the site of the temple of Diana.45 The incense used at the dedication ceremony was the same as that used to worship Diana.

  From the early 340s comes the first Christian text which demanded the ‘total intolerance’ of pagan worship. Between 380 and 450 paganism shrank fast. In particular, after the 380s nothing more is heard of the gymnasium. This was partly to do with the declining fortunes of the empire: city authorities could no longer afford to fund the civic schools. But it was also due to Christian attitudes. ‘ “The physical side of education languished in a Christian environment”: in the cities, it had been linked with naked exercise, paganism and consenting homosexuality. The eventual “collapse of the gymnasia, the focal point of Hellenism, more than any other single event brought in the Middle Ages”.’46 In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy at Athens, ‘the last bastion of intellectual paganism’.47 By 530, when the same man founded a new city in north Africa, the art there was totally Christian, all the pagan elements incorporated into a new iconography.

  There was one final reason for the success of Christianity. People thought that religious solidarity would help the declining fortunes of the Roman state. In turn this implied a crucial change in the organisation of society, a change that, as we have already indicated, would shape the Middle Ages. This was the rise of the priesthood.

  In the early days, the main idea sustaining the church was ‘the gift of the spirit of Jesus’. It was believed that the Apostles had received this spirit from Jesus: this is why Peter spoke in tongues, and Paul had visions. In turn the Apostles passed the spirit on to the early church leaders in Rome: these ‘presbyters’ were distinguished from their congregations in that they sat at a table, while the others stood. But the most important development, what made the priesthood a class apart, was the emergence of the bishops. The term ‘bishop’ is Greek, originally a word meaning ‘overseer’. In the early church, congregations were grouped into colleges of seven, and the bishop was the chief of the seven presbyters.48 Out of this, and combined with the ‘gift of the spirit’, there grew the idea that only bishops could mediate between Christians and their God, only they could interpret the scriptures.

  To begin with there were bishops in all the great Mediterranean cities–Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Carthage and Rome–and they were all more or less equal in power and influence. They would occasionally gather in councils, or synods, to settle matters of doctrine, such as whether they had the power to forgive sin. This had the effect of making the bishops a rank apart from the rest of the church. Celibacy was not yet an issue but a life apart, dedicated to meditation and study-reading, was becoming the fashion for priests. A final factor in the build-up of the priesthood was Constantine’s decision to grant to the Christian clergy the benefit that had been granted to pagan priests–freedom from taxation and conscription in the army. A later emperor, Gratian (375–383), also freed priests from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, placing them instead under the bishops’ courts in all cases except criminal matters. Given that bishops were also allowed to receive bequests, the priesthood had become, by the fifth century, a privileged class: they were rich, they were firmly in charge of church doctrine, and they were very largely a law unto themselves. As one historian put it, the priesthood had ‘acquired those political, economic and intellectual privileges which were to make it for a thousand years always an important and sometimes a dominant element in western society’.49

  The rise of Rome as a pre-eminent centre of Christianity was by no means a foregone conclusion. In the early days, if anyone was more important, it was the bishop of Antioch, but Carthage and Alexandria also ranked high. The bishops in each place were addressed as ‘Patriarch’. But Rome was capital of the empire, and both Peter and Paul, according to tradition, had been there. So the ‘spirit of Jesus’ was especially strong along the Tiber. Even so, Clement, the first bishop of Rome (discounting Peter), did not claim to be above the other bishops. Not until the time of Victor (fl. c. 190–198) did this change, when he tried to excommunicate a number of bishops in the east who refused to accept his decision over the dating of Easter.50 At the first ecumenical council, in 325, Rome was said to have more prestige than anywhere else, but not more power. But by the time of the Council of Serdica (modern Sofia in Bulgaria), which was held in 343, the delegates agreed that when certain ecclesiastical matters were disputed, they would be referred to Rome.

  Rome’s authority was never fully accepted in the east, of course, but a number of enterprising popes made Rome more and more of a focal point during the decline of the empire, when powers were leaching away from the emperors. (‘Pope’, Latin Papa, is of course the equivalent of Patriarch = Father.) Pope Damasus (366–384) drained the hill where his villa stood (this is now the Vatican) and took up where Constantine left off, collecting relics of the martyrs. He also renovated the tombs of the early Christians. Rome, therefore, became a spectacle for Christian pilgrims in a way that Antioch or Carthage, for example, never did. Pope Leo I (440–461) identified (that is to say, invented) the doctrine of the ‘Apostolic Succession’, specifically quoting Matthew 16: 18–‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ The gift of the spirit also came in useful here. Leo prevailed on the emperor of the time to insist that Rome’s authority was supreme throughout the empire and was able to do so because of two spectacular diplomatic victories of his own–first, in 451, when he persuaded the Huns to withdraw from Rome; and second, in 455, when he saved the city from the Vandals.51

  But early Christianity was not only about the development of the ‘sacred hierarchy’, the priesthood. The other dominant idea of the early years was the notion of monasticism, the idea that full spirituality is best achieved by renouncing the world and all its temptations.52

  Monasticism, as we shall see, was not only a Western notion. But, in the Mediterranean area, it was born in a hollow known as Wadi Natrun, or the valley of Soda, ‘about a day’s camel journey west of the Nile delta’.53 As early as the middle of the second century a group of hermits began to gather there. By the following century both men and woman from all over Christendom were drawn to the wadi, led by a hermit known as Ammon. Each hermit would build a two-roomed cell, hewn from the raw rock (this usually took about a year). After that they lived mostly by weaving rugs whi
ch merchants bought from them and sold in the markets of Alexandria. According to one estimate there were 5,000 hermits in the valley of Soda by the end of the fourth century. ‘The attraction lay partly in the fact that, with the decline of persecution, and the opportunities it offered for martyrdom, the temptations of the daemons that were supposed to inhabit the Wadi Natrun were the next best thing.’54 ‘Hermit’ derives from the Greek word for ‘desert’.

  In contrast to the hermits of the desert, the first community of monks was established very early in the fourth century, some 600 miles further up the Nile, at Tabennesi. Here, Pachomius (c. 292–346) conceived the first set of rules for a way of life removed from the world. Each monk had his own hut and his time was divided into two main segments–learning the New Testament by heart, and an occupation which was assigned to him.55 As a result of all this, the first monks in Rome were known as ‘Egyptians’. But the idea of retreat had grown popular and monasteries in the west began to be established at the beginning of the fourth century. The most influential, by far, was that founded by Benedict of Nursia (d. 543), who devised a form of living together that had a great influence on the intellectual life of Europe. (The period 550 to 1150 has often been called ‘the Benedictine centuries’.)56 His monastery was built at Monte Cassino, on a hill some hundred miles south of Rome. It took Benedict a long while to prepare his Rules for Monks which, after a number of painful experiments, aimed to provide the ideal religious life. He had tried the hermit approach, but found it lonely and even psychologically dangerous.57 His community was conceived as entirely self-contained, economically and politically as well as spiritually. Outside interference was allowed only when scandal threatened. The abbot was elected by the monks for life and his authority was absolute. But he had a duty to feed his charges and keep them healthy. The ‘black monks’ (from the colour of their habit) were to live in silence and ‘abstraction’ from the world and admittance wasn’t easy. To begin with, all applicants were kept waiting–refused entrance–for five days. Only if they were prepared to wait were they admitted, and only then as a novice, who was kept under the protection and guidance of an established monk for a full year. Only after that time, and if the novice still wished to continue, was he granted ‘stability’, as full membership was called. And membership was very different from the Wadi Natrun, being communal in every respect. Men worked, prayed, ate and slept together and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Their duties filled every hour of the day and services were held throughout the day and night.

  Without meaning to, Benedict had created an institution that turned out to be perfectly suited to the early Middle Ages. Amid and after the fall of the empire, when the cities declined and the world became less organised and more localised, when schools and other civic functions decayed, monasteries–located far from the cities–remained strong and offered a lead in education, economic, religious and even political matters. The monks often became intercessors with the deity and in consequence monasteries were endowed by royalty and the aristocracy alike. They enjoyed immense riches and abbots became local powers of great influence.

  Christianity was a new system of belief but it was also much more. Between the fourth and sixth centuries, in Europe mainly, its priestly elite took over many of the civil, political and even legal functions of the declining empire. Useful as this was, it determined the basic character of the Middle Ages, as a gap opened up between the clergy and the laity, who were no longer allowed to preach in the churches (there would come a time when they were not even allowed to read the Bible). Simultaneously, the church offered an escape from the harsh rigours of everyday life into an ‘otherworld’. This idea in particular gave the clergy great control over the laity.

  This authority of the clergy was reinforced by the development of the scriptures and the liturgy. In the very beginning, Jesus had written nothing. But gradually a canon of written works was established. The first two were in Aramaic, one known as The Sayings of Jesus and the other as A Book of Testimonies. These comprised mainly excerpts from the Old Testament which appeared to confirm that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. It was, in other words, a text aimed at Jews rather than Gentiles. There was a third work, called The Teaching of the Lord by the Twelve Apostles, which was a guide on how to organise the early church, and on the correct form of worship.58 The very idea of holy scriptures was a Jewish idea, and Christianity retained its debt to Judaism in many areas (such as the observance of the Sabbath, albeit on a different day of the week). Baptism and communion were both Christian innovations, which are still with us, but there was a third practice that, but for a few sects, has dropped out. This was speaking in tongues, ‘which was held to be the way the Holy Spirit made itself known to congregations’.59 The practice had been taken over from the Greek mystery cults.

  But the literary tradition really began to flourish after Paul began writing letters to the congregations he had founded (‘Letter to the Corinthians’, ‘Letter to the Ephesians,’ and so on). Neither Paul nor the congregations ever imagined these ‘epistles’ would one day form part of any sacred book; he was just commenting on the doctrine he had been handed down orally. Most were written between the years 50 and 56.60 Interpreting Jesus’ career was all very well but for the faithful, in the early years especially, the most important fact was that he had existed, been crucified and resurrected. Therefore, around 125, at Ephesus, the decision was taken to use all four gospels as the basis for worship. This would keep all aspects of Jesus in perspective and contain any heresies that broke out. It was the early heresies that eventually resulted in the establishment of a canon of works. Three early heresies were particularly influential in shaping church doctrine. These were those of Valentinus (d. 160), who argued that Jesus was a phantom, not a real person, who had suffered no pain on the cross; of Marcion (fl. c. 144), who argued that Jesus wasn’t Jewish and was the son of a ‘higher and kindlier’ god than Yahweh; and Montanus (fl. c. 150–180), who was against the church structure, arguing that the clergy should consist only of ‘inspired prophets’ who had ‘the gift of the spirit’ and that what they said, rather than any gospel, should determine worship.61 In response to these wayward beliefs, the church came together to form not just the canon of New Testament works, but also the central elements of religious practice. This was when communion became established, a re-enactment of the Last Supper, by means of which Christians believed they atoned for their sins (a Jewish idea) and gained salvation (a Greek Gnostic idea). The phrase ‘New Testament’ was first used in 192.62 And so, by the year 200 Christianity was well on the way to becoming a religion of the book, something else it shared with Judaism. This, of course, only added to the power of the priesthood because they were, for the most part, the only people who could read.

  The apostolic tradition was of course a powerful tool for the faithful, and a useful way of asserting Rome’s supremacy in Christendom. But Rome was not the only centre, not the only influential location for ideas. Just as the gospel of John was influenced by Greek and Gnostic beliefs at Ephesus, so other writers in the eastern Mediterranean combined philosophy and theology to produce a more sophisticated Christianity. These men are usually called the Church Fathers (patres ecclesiae). Outside Rome, there were two centres where they shone, at Alexandria and Antioch. The Alexandrians, much influenced by Gnostic beliefs, developed in particular an allegorical method of understanding the Bible–to such an extent that hidden meanings were found even in misspellings. It was in this way that the practice of biblical exegesis was begun.63

  The best-known of the Alexandrians was Clement (c. 150–216), whose aim was to reconcile pagan scholarship–especially Greek ideas–with Christianity. In his book, Pedagogus, Clement argued that Plato occupied a position analogous to the prophets of ancient Israel. Plato’s Logos, translated in English as ‘Word’, though it is more complex than that, was the eternal principle of reason, which creates a link between the higher world of God and the lower, created world of man. This wa
s, said Clement, revealed to Plato as the prophets of Israel had had inspiration revealed to them, so that man might come to know the true faith, the preparation of Israel for the coming of Jesus. In Plato’s theory of ideas, Clement found a ‘contempt’ for ‘this world’ which was echoed in the teachings of Jesus (and found expression, for example, in the practice of monasticism).64

  Clement had run a school in Alexandria but was forced to leave. After a gap of some years, his school was reopened by Origen (c. 185–254), teaching pagan subjects (rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, philosophy) alongside Hebrew. He produced many books, two of which were the first work of Christian exegesis, known as the Hexapla and the ‘earliest systematic presentation of Christian theology’, The Principles of Things.65 Origen’s most famous innovation was that everything in the Bible has three meanings–the literal, the moral and the allegorical and that only the last of these is the revealed truth. For him, for example, the Virgin Birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not to be primarily understood in a literal way. It really represented the birth of divine wisdom in the soul.66 Origen was the pupil of someone we have met before, Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism. Under his influence, Origen argued that the universe was ‘a hierarchy of spiritual beings, with God at the apex and the devil and fallen angels at the base’.67 God, Origen said, was knowable in two ways–through nature, the rationally ordered universe, and through Christ, who was the full revelation of his mercy and wisdom. Man comprised a rational soul in a body of flesh and because of that occupied a position half-way between the angels and the demons. The soul was corrupted by its presence in the body and the object of life was to ‘behave in such a way that one corrupted one’s soul as little as possible’.68 For Origen the soul pre-existed man, while after the death of the body it passed into a state of purification and ‘in the end all souls, purified by fire, will share in the universal restitution’.69 Origen did not believe, however, that resurrection would be of the material body, and this view became more and more influential as time passed, and the Second Coming did not occur.