by Tom Holland
And so it was, almost two hundred years after a pagan emperor had set himself to uproot the Church, that a Christian Caesar moved to extirpate what remained of paganism, and to rout the demons for good. In the highlands beyond Ephesus, where it was reported that Artemis, a terrifying hag as tall as ten men, still stalked the unwary, missionaries were commissioned to redeem the peasantry from their doltish ignorance of Christ—and with such success that a single bishop reportedly secured a full seventy thousand souls. Meanwhile, in the capital itself, agents were busy sniffing out any hint of demon worship in public life. Ferocious laws were passed against the practice. All Christians found guilty of idolatry were to be put to death, while pagans and heretics were to be granted three months’ grace—after which, if they had not converted, they were to be banned from teaching or holding public office, and rendered utterly destitute. Those who sought to escape baptism by committing suicide could expect their corpses to be treated like those of dead dogs. “For killing, in the opinion of Justinian, was hardly to be ranked as murder, if those who died did not share his beliefs.”120
It did not take long for the ripples of persecution to spread outwards from Constantinople. In 529, news of the emperor’s legislation reached the one city that, more than any other, had remained most inveterately addicted to the pagans’ damnable teachings and fantasies. To what, after all, did the very name “Athens” bear witness, if not the primordial hold upon her of a demon? The great temple of Pallas Athena, the Parthenon, had long since been emptied of its colossal idol of the goddess, and safely converted into a church; but there remained, in the shadow of the Acropolis, schools where the doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras continued to be taught. Not for long, however. It needed no great training in philosophy to appreciate what Justinian’s decrees might mean for even the most eminent of pagan intellectuals. The choices that lay before them could hardly have been any starker: conversion, exile or death. The philosophers—to whom martyrdom appeared no less Christian a fate than baptism—opted for retreat. In 530 or 531,121 they fled Athens and brought down the curtain on a thousand years of philosophy in the city. Dreading to remain anywhere within the reach of Justinian, they threw themselves on the mercy of his only genuine rival: the Shahanshah. Khusrow, delighted by the propaganda coup that this represented, duly offered the exiled philosophers an ostentatious welcome. Ctesiphon, however, would prove no second Athens. Barely a year into their exile there, the philosophers—afflicted with crippling homesickness—begged their new patron for permission to leave. Khusrow graciously agreed and even secured an assurance from Justinian that they would be allowed to live in peace back in their homeland, “without being compelled to alter their traditional beliefs or to accept any view which did not coincide with them.”122 What happened to the philosophers after that, however, is a mystery. Some have suggested that the philosophers did return to their homeland, where they lived in peaceful obscurity; others claim that they settled in that stronghold of pagan exceptionalism, Harran.123 Wherever they ended up, though, one thing is certain: there was to be no resurrection of philosophy in Athens.
“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” So Paul, berating the Athenians for their idolatry, had asked.124 Some five centuries later, there were few who could any longer doubt the answer. In 532, even as the Bishop of Athens was preparing to move into a villa recently vacated by the head of the school founded by Plato, Justinian seized the perfect opportunity to ram home the moral.125 The deadly firestorm of rioting in the heart of Constantinople had left churches as well as bath-houses in ruins. The gravest loss of all had stood just to the north of the Augustaion: the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom—Hagia Sophia. Work to replace it began a mere forty-five days after its destruction; but Justinian had in mind something more, very much more, than mere slavish reproduction. The wisdom of God was to be made manifest in the most daring, spectacular, and colossal vaulted interior that had ever been built. A dome, in majesty “like the very firmament that rests upon the air,”126 would be raised where previously there had been nothing but a gabled roof. Whether viewed from afar—looming vastly above the columns and towers of the Golden City, “so that it seems of a height to match the sky”127—or from within—dazzling the eye with the radiance of its fittings, “almost like a second sun”128—a new and spectacular edifice was to demonstrate to the Christian people the truth to which Justinian had dedicated his entire life: that heaven could indeed be built on earth.
It took less than six years to complete the Church of Hagia Sophia. When the triumphant Justinian, amid the gusting of incense, the clanging of bells, and the blazing of gold, presided over the dedication on 27 December 537, he knew himself in the presence of an authentic miracle. To stand beneath the great dome of Hagia Sophia was to know that God’s wisdom had descended on the fallen earth indeed. The agents of pagan folly had been routed. Order had prevailed over chaos. The empire of the Roman people, once and for all, had been brought to Christ.
But what of those beyond the borders of the empire? Here too, in the minds of Justinian and his advisers, there was cause for optimism. Religio—although a Latin word, and a concept that had been refined to a formidable degree of steeliness under the supervision of a whole succession of Caesars—was certainly not for Romans alone. The claims of “religion”—as Christians had come to define it—were global to a degree that far exceeded those of even the most ambitious emperor. Barbarians who had always stood proof against the might of the legions might certainly be brought to Christ. There was nothing, after all, to stop the Gospel from being preached to the outermost limits of the world. Then, that once achieved, the dome of the heavens would serve to make of the entire earth one immense and universal Hagia Sophia.
That, at any rate—in the court of Justinian—was the hope.
* * *
a Constantinople actually had two Senate Houses: the original stood on the edge of Constantine’s forum, but the one in the Augustaion had largely superseded it by the sixth century.
b One point on which all rabbis could agree was that the Amalekites, a people personally condemned to destruction by God Himself, could never become proselytes. By the time this ruling was formulated, however, no one had any idea where the Amalekites were to be found, or even if they still existed.
c Among non-Christians, “hairesis” had come to signify a school of philosophical thought.
d According to the Syriac writer Jacob of Serugh, there were actually eight sleepers: one who served as spokesman for the group, and seven others. Almost all other Christian sources, however, set the number at seven. The debate is pursued further in the pages of the Qur’an: “Only a few have real knowledge about them,” God admonishes, “so do not argue” (18.22).
e Or possibly “rustic.” The precise meaning of the word has long been debated, but there is a general consensus now that it relates to the sense that Christians had of themselves as milites Christi—“soldiers of Christ.” The term was first used by Tertullian, but it was only after the conversion of Constantine that it began to appear on Christian inscriptions.
f It remains to this day, in the words of Diarmaid MacCulloch, “the standard measure for discussion of the person of Christ, in Churches otherwise as diverse as Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mainstream Protestants” (p. 226).
g Western historians today are much more sensitive to the potential offensiveness of the title than they used to be, but have struggled to come up with a convenient alternative. “Anti-Chalcedonian” is even more of a mouthful than “Monophysite.”
4
THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM
Making the Desert Bloom
Hagia Sophia was not, nor intended to be, a modest building: “Every structure there has ever been,” so one enthusiast gushed, “must cower before it.”1 It was also, of course, the duty of mortals to cower before the god who was glorified there, and whose cross, fashioned out of brilliant gold, blazed from the monumental dome of the cat
hedral, to the awe and wonder of the worshippers far below. “Pantokrator,” the Romans of Constantinople termed Christ: “The Ruler of All.” In Hagia Sophia, and in churches across the Greek world, He was imagined as presiding over a dominion without limits, surrounded by an exquisitely graded hierarchy of angels and saints, unfathomably distant from the indignities of human existence. Precisely the kind of deity, in short, to appeal to Justinian.
But there were ways too of approaching Christ that did not require the sumptuousness of gold and purple. In 527, five years before work began on Hagia Sophia, a small boy named Simeon had trotted through the bazaars and shanty-towns of Antioch, out through the olive groves that stretched southwards of the city, and up the slopes of a nearby mountain. Its rugged heights were no place for a child, nor for anyone with a care for comfort. The wilderness was a realm of danger: the haunt of bandits, lions and bears. To settle amid its crags was to abandon all that made for civilisation, to become a monachos, or “one who lives alone.” Yet the fact was, of course, as the Christian people well understood, that no man was ever truly alone—no, nor woman either. Demons, like flies around a butcher’s stall, swarmed wherever there rose the stench of sin; angels, serried in fiery ranks, served as the legions of God. Veiled from the gaze of fallen humanity, they blazed no less brilliantly for that. Only a monachos—a “monk”—could hope to glimpse them. Those men and women who chose to abandon the perfumed filth of human company, to fix their gaze upon the heavens, to devote themselves exclusively to the service of God, might hope to become suffused with the fire of the Holy Spirit, flesh and bone though they were: “If you will, you can become all flame.”2
It took more than withdrawal from the world for a man or woman to attain this happy condition, however. One monk, asked how salvation could be attained, promptly stripped stark naked and raised his hands to the sky. “So should the monk be,” he declared. “Denuded of all things, and crucified.”3 But in a world where martyrdom was no longer an option, what precisely did it mean to be “crucified”? Here was a question fit to stimulate some truly spectacular feats of self-abnegation. Most monks were content to submit themselves to the communal discipline of a mone—a “monastery.” They would “strip for the contest, spending their days in physical toil and their nights without sleep in giving praise to the Lord.”4 Some, however, looking to go the extra mile, might make a point of mixing ashes into their gruel, or subsisting entirely on waste scraped off the soles of sandals, or living like cattle, chained to cowsheds, and feeding on grass. One particularly creative act of renunciation saw a woman confine herself to a cell with a spectacular riverside view, and then, for the remainder of her life, refuse even once to look out through the window. It required suffering as well as solitude to become a true athlete of God.
Yet when it came to the training—ascesis—required to attain a truly miraculous pinnacle of holiness, there were few who would have denied the palm to the “ascetics” of Syria. Spectacular feats of self-mortification had long been a speciality of the region. One particularly venerable tradition had seen pagans climb pillars—styloi—and stay there for a week at a time, “communing with the gods on high.”5 The bathing of Syria in the light of Christ, even though it had scoured the demons from their temples, had not banished the close association between pillars and access to the supernatural. In around AD 430, a whole century before the young Simeon of Antioch abandoned his home town, another Simeon—a shepherd—had climbed a sixty-foot column on the edge of the Syrian desert. There he had remained, precariously balanced, not for a week, but for thirty long years, until in due course his soul had been gathered up to heaven. The challenge aimed at the demons by this unprecedented feat had been quite deliberate. Simeon’s prodigious austerities had easily eclipsed anything achieved by the pagans. To a people only recently deprived of their ancient gods, the withered, worm-infested and quite fabulously hairy body of the “stylite” had served as an awesome manifestation of the power of their new deity.a Reports of the miracles achieved by Simeon’s prayers had spread as far afield as Ethiopia and Britain. In Rome, his adoring fans had taken to pinning pictures of his pillar to their doorposts. By the time of his death, he had become, quite simply, the most famous man in the world.
The lesson taught by a thoroughbred stylite could hardly have been more emphatic. Sumptuously though great cities might be adorned by monuments to Christ, it was in the wilds that God was likeliest to be heard. Even a child, if sufficiently precocious, might look to part the veil that obscured the realm of the angels and become a vessel for the transfiguring power of the heavens. This was why, almost seven decades on from the death of his illustrious namesake, the young boy named Simeon abandoned his home in Antioch and headed into the wilderness. His aim too was to spend what remained of his life on top of a pillar. Heavenly approval of this youthful ambition was manifest; only a short while before Simeon’s arrival on the mountain, a local monk had been granted a spectacular vision of “a child dressed all in white, and a glowing column, both of them whirling around in the sky.”6 Sure enough, when the boy finally mounted his pillar, after a whole year of heavy-duty training, he was formidably steeled. Not even the demons tugging on his arms, not even the spread of ulcers on his legs, could distract him from his course. Day and night, in rain and blazing sunshine, he kept up his prayers. The infant ascetic was seven years old.
Time passed. As childhood turned to puberty, and puberty to adulthood, and still the demons could not tempt Simeon down from his pillar, his reward was often to see “a great mass of cloud like a carpet of brilliant purple” rolled out before him.7 This was the dimension of the celestial; and sure enough, angels would often appear to the saint, sometimes flanking Christ Himself, sometimes holding a snow-white parchment on which they would write the names of all those mentioned in Simeon’s prayers in blazing letters of gold. As reports of these visions spread, crowds began to mass before his pillar. Many were the miracles performed by the saint, “more numerous than the grains of sand in the sea.”8 The dumb and the blind were healed, as too were a man afflicted by unfeasibly large testicles, “like a pair of clay jars,”9 and another who suffered from chronic constipation, the consequence of “a demon camped out in his colon.”10 Above all, though, Simeon offered blessings to those who could normally expect to receive none: lepers, whores and children, always children. By contrast, towards the mighty, he was unbendingly stern—as well he might have been, for the rich of Antioch, even by the standards of the time, were notorious for their arrogance and cruelty.
Far from resenting this, however, the local elite took great pride in Simeon. As his fame spread, so a day-trip up the side of the mountain to gawp at him silhouetted on the summit became the height of chic. Simeon, who had fled Antioch for the wilderness, discovered that Antioch had followed him. The opportunity to glimpse the authentic radiance of holiness in the stylite’s emaciated and ragged form was simply too precious to waste, even for the very grandest. And perhaps this was just as well: for tourist attractions, after all, did not come cheap. Pilgrims, whether shuffling up the mountainside on leprous stumps or borne in gold-fringed palanquins, needed to be watered, fed, and housed. Inexorably, the longer that Simeon remained on his pillar, the more the rocks that had once surrounded it came to be replaced by impeccably well-dressed marble. The very rage with which the saint berated the rich served only to quicken the flow of gifts to his shrine. This might have appeared a paradox; but it was not. Nothing quite like power, after all, to make the nostrils of the mighty flare; and the power of the divine, the power that made of Simeon a veritable lightning rod of the supernatural, was like nothing else on earth.
Even in far-off Constantinople, where there had always been a tendency to dismiss Syrians as morbid and prone to hysteria, a bona fide stylite had fast become a must-have accessory. As early as 460, a mere year after the death of the original Simeon, one of his disciples had climbed a pillar just outside the capital. There he had remained for the next three decades, lectu
ring heretics on their duty to submit to the Council of Chalcedon and causing anyone who might jeer at him to explode. A succession of emperors had revelled in his austerities, journeying to the pillar to gawp at his sores “and perpetually boasting of the Saint, and showing him off to all.”11 Nothing but the best for Constantinople; just as Constantine had beautified his capital with the plundered statues of pagan gods, his heirs looked to endow the city with the potent mystique of the Syrian ascetics. Indeed, one emperor’s agents had gone so far as to pilfer a few portions of the elder Simeon’s corpse from Antioch, where the saint’s relics were jealously guarded as the city’s most precious treasure. Even those reminders of the stylite that could not be transported to Constantinople had been ostentatiously graced with the marks of an emperor’s favour: for the once lonely pillar on which he had stood, halfway to the sky, had ended up flanked by marble hallways and covered by a colossal dome. The precious wellsprings of holiness, even when they existed on the empire’s frontiers, right on the margins of the desert, were far too precious not to be stamped as imperial.
Nevertheless, there was, in the acknowledgement by Constantinople that certain locations might rank as hallowed ground, just the hint of defeat. The “New Rome,” as its title suggested, had been founded on the presumption that the sacred was readily transferable. Almighty God, who had created the heavens and the entire earth, was not to be pinned down for ever to a single spot. All very well for pagans to imagine that groves, or springs, or rocks might be sacred, and travel on pilgrimage to grovel before them; but Christians were supposed to know better. The charge of the supernatural properly attached itself, not to places but to relics. Of these, Constantinople could boast a quite astounding abundance: for the reach of the emperor was long and grasping, as the guardians of Simeon had discovered to their cost. The heads of prophets, the bodies of apostles, the limbs of martyrs: the capital had bagged them all. Indeed, Constantinople’s array of relics was so incomparable that it lent her precisely what her rulers had always most craved for their capital: the authentic aura of a holy city. Yet, as the crowds who continued to cluster around the elder Simeon’s empty pillar suggested, there were some things that could not be imported. The same pilgrim who travelled to Constantinople or Antioch to pray before the saint’s relics might nevertheless still wish to rub the stone that had once borne the stylite’s stinking feet. Foul-smelling though the ascetics of Syria notoriously were, yet in the air that had once been breathed by Simeon there hung, so many Christians believed, a lingering perfume-trace of paradise.
