Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Jerome (c. 340–419) was an earnest, educated man, who had tried and failed to start his own monastery, and had studied Greek and Hebrew in the Near East. He was recalled to Rome in 377 by Pope Damasus (305–384), who charged him with translating the book of Psalms into Latin. In turn this led to Jerome’s major claim to fame. In Rome he mixed with a group of wealthy women who eventually clubbed together and provided funds for him to build a monastery and research institute near Bethlehem and there he spent the rest of his life translating the entire Bible into Latin, a project which would replace the fragmentary translations that then existed, known as the Itala.70 He used both Hebrew and Greek texts as source material and his aim was to write a work that would please not only scholars and bishops but ordinary people as well. What he produced was a text midway between the Ciceronian Latin of the educated literati and the vulgar language of the streets (the tongue that eventually became vernacular French, Spanish and Italian). This ‘Vulgate’ (popular) Bible was a great success and was the standard version for centuries.

  Without question the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church, and a major figure in the history of ideas, is Augustine (354–430). Thanks to his own writings, a great deal is known about him. He was born on 13 November at Thagaste, now Souk-Ahras, south of Bône (Annaba) in Algeria. His father was a local government officer and a pagan, whereas his mother, Monica, was a Christian. (These ‘mixed marriages’ were not uncommon in the fourth century as the attitudes of Christians softened.) Augustine turned into a great writer (113 books, 200 letters) but he is famously known to history as ‘a great sinner who became a great saint’.71 According to his own confessions, he was a sinner until he was thirty-two, when he turned to Christianity, but even after that he was unable to live up to his hopes because of a ‘weakness in dealing with sexual temptation’. (‘Lord, give me chastity,’ he used to pray, ‘but not yet.’72) Augustine’s great humanity makes him a very sympathetic character, to which he added the gifts of a great writer–the Confessions and City of God are masterpieces of vivid Latin which are of interest today because, before he turned to Christianity, Augustine flirted with most of the other systems of thought available at the time. Because his mother was a Christian, he was exposed to Christianity very early on but, he tells us frankly, he found the Itala dull. Heread Hortensius, allegedly written by Cicero, which led him to Plato and Aristotle and scepticism. For a while, he sampled Manicheism. That didn’t last long. He took a mistress and they formed a stable relationship (fourteen years), creating more flesh (which Mani said was evil), by producing a son. Augustine next tried Neoplatonism but that didn’t suffice either. Then, one day he was reading in his garden when he heard some children singing. The phrase he actually heard was ‘Take up and read’, whereupon, he says, he flipped open his copy of Paul’s epistle to the Romans. (According to Marcia Colish, this opening of a book at random, in order to find a solution to a personal problem, was an early Christian practice derived from the pagan use of Homer and Virgil.73) The thought that Augustine’s eye alighted on that day, and which so attracted his attention, was Paul’s understanding of evil as the ‘spoliation of order’. (The rise of the influence of Paul, the anti-intellectual, in the late fourth century, had an effect on the decline of classical learning, which is the subject of the next chapter.) Neoplatonism had been concerned with order–the hierarchy of beings in the universe. But Augustine’s own great contribution was to add to this the idea of free will. Humans, he said, have the capacity to evaluate the moral order of events or episodes or people or situations, and can then exercise judgement, to order our own priorities, so that we shun the bad route and follow the good one. To choose good, he realised, was to know God. This has proved hugely influential.74

  His humanity apart, Augustine’s cleverness was important too. This was impressively revealed in his ideas about the Trinity, the most important and impassioned division within the early church, which had occasioned the famous council at Nicaea, on the shores of a picturesque lake, near the Sea of Marmara, in modern Turkey, in May 325, under Constantine. As we saw in Chapter 8, the division had been kindled by Arius, from Alexandria, who had argued that Jesus could not be divine in the same way as God the Father was. Arius wasn’t denying that Jesus was divine in some fashion–but, nevertheless, Jesus himself had specifically said that God was greater than he.75 For Arius, Jesus was therefore both different from humans, but different from God also. Insofar as Jesus called God his ‘father’, this implied prior existence and a certain superiority. For Arius, Jesus had been born mortal but became divine; if he had not been human, at least to begin with, there would be no hope for us. At Nicaea, however, the bishops took a different view and in the Nicaean Creed (still in widespread use), it was set down and agreed that God had made the world ex nihilo, from nothing, and that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were the same substance.

  Just because the bishops had agreed didn’t mean the laity had to go along with it. In fact, many early Christians found the idea difficult to grasp (many still do). After some years, however, three formidable theologians from Cappadocia, in eastern Turkey, came up with a solution that satisfied at least some, mainly in the east. These were Basil, bishop of Caesarea (329–379), his brother Gregory, bishop of Nyssa (335–395) and their friend, Gregory of Nazianzus (329–391). Their solution was to argue that God was a single essence (ousia), which remains incomprehensible to us, but there are three expressions (hypostases), through which he was known.76 The Trinity was not three gods but a spiritual/mystical experience, the result of contemplation.

  Augustine built on this and for many people it was his greatest achievement. He argued that since God had made us in his own image (as it said in the Scriptures), ‘we should be able to discern a Trinity in the depths of our minds’.77 In On the Trinity he showed how this idea underlines so much of life. For example, he said there are three faculties of the soul–memory, intellect and will. There are three stages of penance after sin: contrition, confession and satisfaction. There are three aspects to love–the lover, the beloved and the love that unites them. There is memory of God, knowledge of God and love of God. There is the Trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the incarnation in our mind); contemplatio (contemplating them); and dilectio (delighting in them). This was numerology of sorts but it was also a clever intellectual achievement, a fusion of theology and psychology that had never been conceived before.78

  Augustine’s other well-known work was City of God. This was written in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, by far the most traumatic and dramatic of setbacks, and he wrote the book, at least in part, to counter the charge that Christianity must take the blame for this catastrophic reversal. His main aim, however, was to develop a philosophy of history. Augustine was one of those who repudiated the ancient idea of time as cyclical; instead, he said, time was linear and, moreover, it was the property of God who could do with it as he liked. On this reading, the Creation, the covenant with the Old Testament patriarchs, the Incarnation and the institution of the Church may all be seen as the unfolding of God’s will. He said that the Last Judgement would be the last event in history, ‘when time itself will cease and everyone will be assigned their posthumous habitations for eternity’.79 The fall of Rome, he insisted, took place because she had fulfilled her purpose: the Christianisation of the empire. ‘But we should not be deflected by what happens on the grander scale.’ The real purpose of history, he said, was to pit self love against the love of God. ‘Self love leads to the City of Man, love of God to the City of God. These two cities will remain at odds and conflicted throughout time, until the City of God is eternalised as heaven and the City of Man as hell.’80 Augustine’s view of history also involved a great and influential pessimism. The fall of Rome, for example, coloured his doctrine of original sin, which would form such a central part of the Western Christian vision. Augustine came to believe that God had condemned humankind to eternal damnation, all because of Adam
’s original sin. This ‘inherited sin’ was passed on through what Augustine called concupiscence, the desire to take pleasure in sex rather than in God. This image, of the higher life of devotion, dragged down by ‘the chaos of sensation and lawless passion’ was paralleled by the decadence in Rome and as an idea would prove extremely durable. From Augustine on, Christians viewed humanity as chronically flawed.81

  By the time Gregory the Great (540–604) achieved prominence, the barbarian invasions had transformed the map. For example, by the sixth century, the Ostrogoths–who had penetrated Italy more than half a century before–had themselves been chased out by the Lombards. There was still an emperor in Constantinople (Justinian, 527–565) but in the west the extent of barbarian rule meant that many of the functions traditionally carried out by the Roman civil service–education, poor relief, even food and water supply–were carried out by the bishops.82 Gregory was a marvellous administrator and under him the church became ever more efficient in an everyday, worldly sense. But he was also a contemplative man and this mix made him perfectly suited to advancing doctrines that added to the appeal of the church for ordinary souls. For example, he wanted to make the liturgy more accessible to the faithful and his genius was to involve music. Thus was born Gregorian chant. In the same spirit he invented the notion of purgatory. He was particularly concerned with what should happen when a sinner received absolution from a priest, and had been instructed in a programme of ‘satisfaction’, as it was called, but died before the programme could be completed. To Gregory, it would be grossly unfair to condemn such a person to hell, but at the same time he or she could not go to heaven, since it would be wrong to admit that person alongside those who had completed their programme. His solution was a new, albeit temporary destination–purgatory–where people could complete their satisfactions, endure their punishments, and then, all being well, move on–to heaven. His other ‘user friendly’ idea for the faithful was that of the seven deadly sins. Evil, for Gregory, would always be a mystery for man: God intended it as such, as a test of faith (as it had been for Job). But the seven deadly sins were intended by Gregory to be a guide for the faithful, so that they weren’t always ‘overwhelmed’ by a sense of sin. The seven sins were set out on a scale of increasing seriousness: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.83 This made it clear to all that sins of the intellect were more serious than sins of the flesh.

  By now the Christianisation of time was almost complete. The main festivals of Christianity, celebrating the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, had not been agreed upon for quite a while after Christ’s crucifixion. The English word Easter was named after the old Scandinavian pagan goddess of dawn and spring, Eostre, and to begin with, this festival was far more important than Christmas, because it celebrated the resurrection, without which there would be no Christian faith. (The French Pâques–Italian and Spanish too–is derived from the Hebrew, pesakh, for Passover.) In Rome, Easter was being celebrated as early as AD 200, according to a letter written on that date, which mentions a ceremony involving the burning of wax candles. Christmas, on the other hand, was not celebrated until the fourth century.

  Since the gospels give no information about Jesus’s birth date the early theologians, as we have seen, took over pagan practices. Easter was a more complex matter. According to the gospels, Christ died on the first day of the Jewish Passover. This, according to Hebrew tradition, is the day of the full moon that follows the spring equinox and, because it is based on a lunar calendar of 354 days, changes its date in the solar rotation (365¼ days) every year. This would have been a tricky enough calculation to do at the best of times but the early Christians made it even harder for themselves by adding a further twist. They decided that Easter should be always celebrated on a Sunday, since Christ’s resurrection had taken place on that day, and because it set them apart from the Jews, who celebrated their Sabbath on Saturday. In the very early days of the Church, Easter was celebrated on different days in different countries around the Mediterranean, but in 325, at the Council of Nicaea, 318 bishops decided that the festival would be observed on the same date all over Christendom. The day chosen was the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. Apart from being mentioned in the Bible, the theological significance of this date was that it was a day of maximum light–twelve hours of daylight, followed by twelve hours of full moonlight. This contrasted strongly with Christmas, in the depths of darkness. In time Christian theologians built up layers and layers of allegory linking the moon to the Easter story. Easter falls in the spring, the season when the world was first fashioned and the first man installed in Paradise. The moon itself is resurrected each month and, like Christ, offers a light to the world. The moon shines with reflected–i.e., borrowed–light from heaven, just as man’s grace is borrowed from the Lord.84

  Greek astronomers, as was discussed in Chapter 8, had discovered that, after nineteen years, the sun and the moon returned to their respective positions (the Metonic cycle). But this took no account of the seven-day week (which the Greeks didn’t use) and once the Council of Nicaea had ordained that Easter must fall on a Sunday it took another century and more before Victorius of Aquitaine, in 457, worked out that a further 28-year cycle (accounting for days of the week and leap years) needed to be added to the arithmetic. He therefore came up with a 532-year cycle (28 × 19) as the only repeatable rhythm that took account of all the variables.85 This continued to be tinkered with and was not properly finalised until the Venerable Bede, in England, put an end to the controversy in his great work on time, De ratione temporum (On the Calculation of Time), published in 725. But the ‘Easter controversy’, as it became known, had two further knock-on effects. Twentieth-century scholars, with the benefit of later archaeological discoveries, numismatical finds, not to mention the much more accurate astronomical advances that were made after the Copernican revolution, have been able to date the original Good Friday more and more precisely–the two most favoured dates now are 7 April AD 30 and 3 April AD 33. But the early Christian scholars had none of these advantages, and in the sixth century the abbot of Rome, Dionysius Exiguus (‘Dennis the Little’, on account of his self-demeaning manner), conceived the idea that the Easter tables, as well as being used to calculate the dates for Easters in the future, could also be worked in reverse, all the way back to find the exact date of the original Passion. Dating, as we have noted, had not been of prime concern to the early Christians, for two reasons. In addition to the fact that they were convinced that the Second Coming of the Messiah was imminent, they tried to stress, in Rome at least, that Christianity was an old faith, not a new one, that it had grown organically out of Judaism and was therefore much more established than the rival pagan cults. This helped them avoid the derision of critics, so they kept new dates to a minimum. But, as time went by, and the Messiah failed to appear, the liturgical calendar took on a new urgency, highlighting points in the year when the faithful could rally.86

  The calendar in use at the time Exiguus made his calculations was based on the accession of the emperor Diocletian, which took place in 285. Thus, the year that we call 532 was for Dionysius the year 247. But Exiguus didn’t see why time should start with a pagan emperor and it was during his Easter calculations that the abbot conceived the idea to divide time according to the birth of Christ. And here there befell Exiguus an extraordinary numerological coincidence. Victorius of Aquitaine, as we have seen, had come up with a 532-year cycle. As Exiguus worked back, in the year we call 532, he found that a Victorian cycle had begun in the very year in which he believed that Christ had been born–what we now call 1 BC. In other words, the sun and the moon, at the time he was working, were in exactly the same relation as they had been when Jesus was born. This was too much of a coincidence and, in the words of the Venerable Bede, confirmed for Dennis that 1 BC was indeed the year ‘in which He deigned to become incarnate’. From then on, and thanks to Dennis, dates were given as Anni Domini, ‘years of the Lord�
��. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that it became customary to designate the preceding era ‘before Christ’.87

  Such dates had far more resonance then than they do now. This was because, according to the early theologians, the world would last for six thousand years. The reasoning behind this arose from the second letter of Peter (3:8), where it says, ‘…one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’. It had taken the Lord six ‘days’ to make the Earth, so it made tidy sense for it to last equally long. Using genealogies in the Bible, theologians such as Eusebius calculated that the world was 5,197 or 5,198 years old when Jesus was born. By AD 532, therefore, the world had only another 271 years, at the most, before the Apocalypse–and Paradise for the faithful. Accuracy in the calendar really mattered.