by Cyril Mango
The Seven Sages with Socrates at the centre. Mosaic of the fourth century AD found under the floor of the cathedral of Apamea. It has been connected with the school of Neoplatonic philosophy known to have flourished in that city.
Was Christianity a religio, a superstitio, or a philosophy? By Roman standards it hardly qualified as a religion. Instead of being civic, it appeared as a kind of underground, cosmopolitan mafia. It did not entail anything that could be recognized as a cult, such as sacrifice offered to statues. It did have its rites, but these were performed behind closed doors. It is interesting to note in the light of future developments that early Christians, reacting to the ritualism of the Jews, laid little stress on the precise conduct and uniformity of observance. The apostles, they pointed out, had laid on them no other obligation than ‘to abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication’ (Acts 15: 29).
Another factor that told against Christianity was its recent origin, whereas respectable religions were ancient. In this regard the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had an unbeatable advantage, while the Jews could claim that Moses, their lawgiver, had lived a thousand years before the Trojan War—at any rate much earlier than the wise men of the Greeks. Traditional pagans, whose historical records went no further back than the sixth century BC, could nevertheless point to Orpheus and other semi-divine figures from a distant past. The Christians for their part could only say, ‘We are of yesterday (hesterni sumus), but our scriptures are ancient’—a line of reasoning that required the questionable qualification, ‘We have the same scriptures as the Jews, but they do not understand them properly, whereas we do.’ Eventually, various sophistries were devised to prove that Christianity was not only ancient, but, indeed, the oldest religion of all: for whereas Abraham was the founder of Judaism, the righteous patriarchs before him, being neither of the Jewish faith nor idolaters, could only be called proto-Christian. Thus Christianity could be shown to go back to the garden of Eden.
The superiority of religion over science. The astronomer Ptolemy, symbolized by the personification of Inquiry (Skepsis) behind him, is perplexed, while Hermes the Thrice-great sees the divine apparition, possibly of Christ, to whom the other personification points. Found in the sea off the coast of Gaza. Silver plate of the fifth century, 45 x 48 cm.
Actually, Christianity was even newer than it looked, for if its name originated in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, its doctrine had been thoroughly redesigned since the days of the apostles. It is not part of our story to describe the successive adjustments and elaborations that transformed a minor messianic movement into a Church of universal appeal, but it is important to point out that Christian teaching had not quite jelled at the time when Constantine stuck in his heavy boot with consequences that were to last throughout Byzantine history.
The polemicist Celsus (c.AD 180) was a little out of touch when he claimed that Christianity appealed only to women, children, and slaves, for at the very time when he was writing his diatribe Christian thinkers had embarked on the irreversible course of turning their religion into a philosophy, i.e. a coherent, total system, which may fairly be described as the greatest intellectual achievement of Late Antiquity. We are so familiar with the resultant synthesis that we tend to forget the enormous effort of scholarship and critical reflection that went to create it. Unlike traditional Greek philosophies, Christian philosophy was based on revelation contained in scripture whose every word counted. The bulk of that scripture (what now became the Old Testament), a mix of tribal history, ritual prescriptions, cosmology, prophecy, and inspirational musings, was both profoundly alien to Mediterranean peoples and accessible only through a translation into colloquial Greek (the Septuagint) whose accuracy could not be taken for granted. As a first step, therefore, the entire text of the Old Testament had to be checked against the Hebrew original; apocrypha had to be weeded out of the canon; each and every genuine book of the Bible needed to be expounded so as to bring out both its literal and its symbolic meaning; the parts that were no longer applicable, i.e. the ritual prescriptions, had to be identified. But that was only the beginning. Seeing that the Old Testament was largely a book of history concerned with the fortunes of a marginal nation, its narrative and chronology had to be integrated with the records (largely fictitious, but nevertheless accepted) of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Babylonians. The account of Creation in the book of Genesis had to be made credible in terms of contemporary cosmological thinking. It had to be explained why the Almighty had shown so much concern for the greater part of recorded history with the salvation of the Jews to the exclusion of all other nations and why the incarnation of Christ had occurred as late as it did. And then at the heart of the system was the insoluble conundrum of Christ the Logos, who had been ‘with God’ from the beginning, had created everything, and then, paradoxically and unacceptably to current pagan thinking, ‘became flesh’ and, indeed, suffered a humiliating death unworthy of a god. Was the Logos an emanation of the Father or a distinct person and, if the latter, was he self-existent or had he been created by the Father at some infinitely remote time, which would make him, so to speak, a divinity of the second degree?
Such were some of the inevitable problems consequent to the attempt of transforming Christianity into a philosophy, and their working out, especially as regards Christ the Logos, was to last for a good three centuries after Constantine. If, however, we go back to an earlier period, we discover that not all committed Christians were keen on being taken down the path to philosophy, mindful as they were of St Paul’s admonition, ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit’ (Coloss. 2: 8). On this topic there was a good deal of ambiguity. In one sense Christianity was the only ‘sure and profitable’ kind of philosophy as Justin Martyr put it; in another, Athens had nothing to do with Jerusalem, to recall Tertullian’s famous dictum (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? quid academiae et ecclesiae? … Nostra institutio de porticu Solomonis est1). Christians were not philosophers not only because philosophy was vain and provided no firm answers, but, more importantly, because philosophy was not efficacious, because it did not put demons to flight. Christianity did.
Pagan sages, here the ‘Hellene’ Pythagoras and ‘Queen Sibyl’, predict the advent of Christ. Wall painting representing the Tree of Jesse in the Moldavian monastery of Voroneţ, AD 1547.
Tertullian was not speaking figuratively any more than the demons that sweep across the pages of the New Testament are to be understood as metaphors. Gentlemen like Marcus Aurelius could sneer at such childishness, but belief in the reality of demons was endemic in Late Antiquity. It should be explained that these were not the daimones (minor divinities) of Greek thought, but malevolent spirits, immortal and fast-moving, that preyed on human beings and even farm animals, causing derangement of the senses, many kinds of sickness, and, in humans, sinful desires. ‘We wrestle’, wrote St Paul, ‘not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world’ (Eph. 6: 12). The rulers (kosmokratores) of darkness were the demonic powers that held sway in this nether world. The whole edifice of paganism could only be understood as a vast demonic machine, but its suppression did not entail the end of demonic activity. Ejected from the temples, where they had battened on the grease and smoke of burnt offerings, demons moved into the countryside, into tombs and solitary places, but were especially numerous in the agitated region of the upper air. From its inception Christianity had proved the most efficacious weapon against demons. Christ, himself an exorcist, had explicitly promised to his disciples power over the demons, and it was thanks to that gift that Christianity had won its first converts— perhaps most of its early converts.
In the light of medieval European experience we tend to regard conversion to Christianity as a step up the ladder of culture and literacy. Undoubtedly it was so in the case of Saxons, Norsemen, Balts, and Slavs. But in the world of Late Antiquity conversion was
often seen by cultivated people as a dumbing down. That is not to say that after the end of the second century Christianity could be described as anti-intellectual. On the contrary, it was becoming, as we have pointed out, distinctly erudite and was churning out copious treatises on ‘theory’ and apologetics heavily indebted to pagan philosophy. How many non-Christians read them is an open question, but if they had taken the trouble to do so, they would have found them as boring as the handbooks of Marxism-Leninism that used to be produced not so long ago in ‘socialist’ countries. And that is where the difficulty lay. For there existed at the time a highly sophisticated if thinly spread literary culture to which we must now turn our attention. It was based on a system of education that had remained virtually unchanged since the Hellenistic period and may be described as ‘liberal’ and non-technical. Boys of a certain social class, after learning in secondary school their classical poets (especially Homer and Hesiod) and a few tragedians (especially Euripides), went on to study eloquence as a general preparation to whatever profession they chose to follow, be it law, government or municipal service, teaching, or a life of cultivated leisure. Eloquence, for which Demosthenes and other Attic orators were proffered as models, meant the ability to speak and write in an approved style as laid down in dozens of textbooks, using an archaic idiom, namely Attic Greek, that in itself served as a class badge. While not deliberately ideological, this kind of education was permeated with pagan lore. Boys had to learn the myths and genealogies of the gods and the texts they absorbed were dominated by pagan values. Feeding into the practice of rhetoric, but also pursued on its own account, was a vast accumulation of erudition drawn from grammar, history, mythology, geography, astrology—the detritus of an old culture, collected from books, anthologized, paraded in after-dinner conversation.
It is difficult for us to appreciate the degree of enthusiasm which the practice of eloquence inspired throughout the Late Roman world. Professors of rhetoric (called rhetors or sophists) held endowed chairs in the main cities, attracted students from a wide catchment area, gave public performances before huge audiences, were sent on embassies to plead local causes, and were honoured with statues. Along with famous philosophers, they were the only class of people, apart from rulers, whose biographies were written down before the same privilege was extended to Christian saints. Above all, rhetoric served as a cultural glue that bound together the elites of the empire’s far-flung cities. Not only were the students drawn from different areas; the professors themselves were increasingly international. Among those who won renown in the fourth century we find two Arabs, a Phoenician, a Mesopotamian from faraway Nisibis, and, amazingly, a Christian Armenian bearing the splendid name of Prohaeresius.
Let us take a concrete example, that of Libanius (314–93), who may be described as Mr Literature of the fourth century. His preserved works, largely unread today, fill eleven volumes in the standard edition and include 64 orations, 1,544 letters, 51 declamations, and a mass of school exercises. Libanius was a member of the landed gentry and occupied for half a century the chair of eloquence in his native Antioch. Born ten years before Constantine had made himself master of the East, a friend and admirer of the emperor Julian, he lived into the reign of the militantly Christian Theodosius I, who nevertheless conferred on him, a pagan, an honorary praetorship. Yet he tells us little about the momentous ideological changes he witnessed and is practically silent on the topic of Christianity. Not that he lived in an ivory tower. Nearly 200 of his students are known by name and he spared no effort to lobby on their behalf. They went on to become imperial officials, lawyers, teachers, members of municipal councils, thus creating a vast network of personal connections. Among them there were Christians, including (or so it was said) St John Chrysostom, St Gregory Nazianzen, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, a leading theologian of the Syrian Church. Libanius took up certain causes that affected him: he defended culture as he understood it; he railed against the ‘technicians’, who took up the study of law and shorthand to gain advancement in imperial service; he deplored the closure of temples. He was too famous to be censored or punished by a Christian government. But what was the secret of his success? Hardly his personality. In his autobiography he appears vain, neurotic, superstitious, and malicious, especially towards his competitors. We can only conclude that his reputation rested on his acknowledged literary gifts and public delivery, nor was the judgement of his contemporaries reversed by posterity. He remained a model of eloquence throughout the Byzantine period (hence the preservation of his works) and it was only in the nineteenth century that he began to sink into oblivion. Even today we still have to read him in Greek: only a small part of his vast output has been translated into a modern language.
How was the Church to react to the kind of culture exemplified by Libanius? Short of boycotting it altogether (the fundamentalist solution), it could either acquiesce in it or provide a curriculum of new, Christian classics suitable for schooling. Such a Christian literature, however, did not exist and the Bible, though occasionally forceful, was widely regarded as barbarous in its language and style. The issue came up when Julian briefly banned Christian teachers from expounding pagan classics, i.e. deprived them of a livelihood. His measure was condemned on all sides. A few Christians rose to the challenge like the two Apollinarii (father and son) who turned the Old Testament into a poem using every kind of ancient Greek metre and the New Testament into a Platonic dialogue. Rather more significant is the case of Gregory Nazianzen, who composed not only highly rhetorical sermons, but also letters and poems with the express purpose of vying with the ancients. His efforts were rewarded in that he became in the Byzantine period a literary model and the most widely imitated Christian author. But that did not alter the perception that Christianity had no literary culture suitable for schooling. Secular education was, therefore, left in place, merely with a ‘health warning’: Christian boys were urged to disregard the immoral stories of the old gods and concentrate on what was good and useful. Besides, as the Church historian Socrates explained in the 440s, ‘Hellenic’ (i.e. pagan) education had been neither approved nor rejected by the Church, and that for good reason. For the scriptures do not teach logical argument and if Christians are to refute the enemies of truth, they should use the pagans’ own weapons against them. What happened in effect was that Christian leaders who had themselves benefited from a rhetorical education introduced into their preaching and writing the precepts they had learnt in school, as is evident from the literary works not only of Gregory Nazianzen, but also of John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and a host of others. None of them stooped to using ordinary speech so as to reach the masses.
Christianity became the religion of state only under Theodosius I in about AD 380. Constantine had proclaimed his personal attachment to it—not an unprecedented act among earlier Roman emperors. But he went further by actively promoting Christians in his service, showering enormous sums of money on the Church and building lavish houses of congregation and martyrs’ shrines. Step by step, he found himself increasingly involved in ecclesiastical disputes as both umpire and enforcer. For the Church was deeply divided. Still bearing the scars of the Great Persecution (303–11), which had naturally bred deep resentment, suddenly flooded with new money and accorded undreamt-of privileges, the Church, governed by custom, lacked a coherent hierarchical structure that might have enabled it to settle its own affairs. The temptation to appeal to the saviour emperor proved too strong even in matters that should not have concerned him at all, as was the case of the Arian dispute that broke out at that time. The point at issue was purely philosophical. The presbyter Arius of Alexandria taught that Christ the Logos had been created by the Father at some infinitely remote juncture and was not, therefore, of the same essence as the Father. That view, stemming from the doctrine of the great theologian Origen, had considerable support among intellectuals, but the bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, was bitterly opposed to it. Invited to intervene, Constantine summone
d an unprecedented throng of bishops, some 300 in all, to meet in May 325 in the sleepy lakeside city of Nicaea. The sessions took place in the imperial palace, hence on Constantine’s own ground, and although by all accounts he behaved very correctly, he left no doubt that he was in charge. He did not pretend to understand the issues in dispute, but insisted that the bishops come to a consensus. Not surprisingly, he got his way: out of the 300 only five refused to sign on the dotted line, and three of those later changed their mind. Arius was exiled and his books were ordered to be burnt. Anyone concealing them was to suffer the death penalty, no less.
The earliest preserved representation of the Council of Nicaea is in a Carolingian manuscript. It shows an enthroned Constantine (already bearded), the assembled bishops, and, below, a bonfire being made of Arian writings.
It is ironic to recall that a few months before the Council Constantine had written a joint letter to Alexander and Arius, telling them in no uncertain terms that their quarrel was altogether trivial and irrelevant to the worship of God. He urged them to follow the example of philosophers who agree to disagree on small points while preserving the unity of their doctrine. Why then did he get embroiled in a highly abstruse dispute in which he had no interest? Probably because he saw no other way of getting the squabbling bishops to make peace among themselves. He considered it his duty, as he put it on another occasion, to suppress dissension, ‘because of which the Supreme Deity may perchance be moved not only against the human race, but also against me in whose care it has entrusted all earthly things’. A very Roman sentiment: as Pontifex Maximus, Constantine was responsible for the proper cultus or veneratio of the Deity, not for philosophical quibbling. Yet the legacy of Nicaea, the first universal council of the Church, was to bind the emperor to something that was not his concern, namely the definition and imposition of orthodoxy, if need be by force.
