earthmoss

evolving our future

01: Introduction

“We have to face the fact that the creativity we admire happened in an age that was quite as desperate and ugly as Gibbon saw it to be- an age of absolutism and terror, that fostered timorous conformism and blind ideological and sectional prejudice.” (Brown:1972:153)

“In Order that a Religious Institution or a State should long survive it is essential that it should frequently be Restored to its original principles.”

chapter-10-tnIt is a well-established fact that the life of all mundane things is of finite duration. But things which complete the whole of the course appointed them by heaven are in general those whose bodies do not disintegrate, but maintain themselves in orderly fashion so that if there is no change; or, if there be change, it tends rather to their conservation than to their destruction. Here I am concerned with composite bodies, such as are states and religious institutions, and in their regard I affirm that those changes make for their conversation which lead them back to their origins. Hence those are better constituted and have a longer life whose institutions make frequent renovations possible, or which are brought to such a renovation by some event which has nothing to do with their constitution. For it is clearer than daylight that, without renovation, these bodies do not last.”(Crick:1979:385)

The creation of the Catholic Church and its theology that we have so deeply assessed in the previous chapter, was not established in a non-world but in a thrownness of worlding- that of the Roman Empire- that it ‘inherited’ upon its demise.

What we need to look at now is how this worlding of Catholicism took over from the Classical Roman worlding; how this was achieved and how the clash of the Republic and its territorial Empire changed the beliefs and practices of the Christian Church as it formed into this inheritor.

What we need to understand is how the Word of the Son of God, whose ‘tekton’ or organisational theory was one of universal love and peace, became the culture of violence and intolerance, headed by a singular divine office of the Pope in Rome. By doing so we will be able to chart the death of the heterodynamic experience of the soul, and watch it become autodynamic whilst stepping-in-itself to take the place of this homodynamic experience of being-in-Being, as will be more fully charted in the medieval times, from these early roots.

By understanding this journey then we can begin to understand the age of the medieval from its beginning and see its evolution and not as a conglomerate blob of the past that has no relevancy today, with knights and magicians, dragons and wenches, etc, etc, as the media represent it in order to entertain, or contain, us and our world concepts.

To do this we must first answer the following questions: Why did Constantine suddenly choose to make Rome Christian and how had the ideas of Augustine, that we witnessed in the previous chapter, translate themselves into the institutionalised perspective of the church and its subsequent behaviour to its flock and those outside of it?

To answer these questions we must look at the life of Constantine and Augustine and see how they come together over the Pelagian Controversy and the Donatist Controversy, that forced the power of Constantine and the hierarchy and structure of the Church to manifest itself into the institution that it became in the medieval period.  As we will see the art of this manifestation served to increase the temporal power Constantine, of the Church, and of Augustine himself.

Religion becomes the cohering glue to defeat Constantine’s enemies, to gain and maintain the authority to possess the Empire- The necessity of Christianity as a State religion of unprecedented violence.

02: Constantine: 306-337 CE – a very brief biography

What follows below is an annotated version of ‘I Caesar- The men who ruled the Roman Empire’. A BBC Documentary series. To save space we will look at Constantine but briefly before we see the more important parts of his contribution to Catholicism through the life of Augustine in much greater detail. For now I merely wish to prove that Constantine was using Christianity in order to gain power for himself, and not due to any great revelatory vision that he claimed to have had at Miluvian Bridge, as we shall see.

I believe that it will be easier to realise the impact of Rome and Augustine upon Christian conceptual thought and practice if we briefly walk in Constantines shoes from a historical perspective of the ‘movers and shakers’ lens before we move on to the more detailed history of this actual conceptual thought and then to see its resultant practice.

In the 3rd century the Roman empire is under siege. Persia in east is the most feared enemy, over the barbarians in west-  in a world of war, where the emperor is now chosen by the armies of the frontiers and not the senate. His father supported Diocletian in a coup against the emperor, and won.

Diocletian as emperor now shares power with Maximian to keep empire, Diocletian is senior and rules East. Constantines father divorces his wife and marries Maximians daughter. Diocletian splits empire into four- the Tetrarchy-, and Constantines father gets one of these 4 territories centred around Trier in Gaul, becoming a Caesar. Constantine held by Diocletian as a hostage to maintain fathers loyalty, and so is brought up in the court of Diocletian.

Diocletian now sure that rule of 4 has stabilised empire with his organisational theory of the tetrarchy-, goes on the offensive against the barbarians and the Persians with Galerius leading the attack, a young Constantine rides along with him, making a name for himself in battle.

Diocletian didn’t want dynasties and had to watch Constantines rise, grooming him but also watching him.

2% of Rome is Christian under Diocletian, concentrated in the Greek-Eastern cities trying to get control of government. Glorious afterlife and expiation of sin found appealing by many Romans. Problem with Christianity was denial of existence of other divinities that had helped Diocletian regain his empire. AD 303 Churches demolished, bibles burnt, torture and executions under Galerius’ encouragement. Constantine watches the Christian commitment to their faith, as they die, and it this martyrdom courage and faith shown by them that impresses Constantine.

Upon the death of Diocletian, Constantines father is made Augustus of the Western part of the Empire and Galerius is made Augustus in East. Constantine is expected to become Caesar of a part of the Empire, but Galerius did not wish to set up a western dynasty and so he was not chosen. His father feared for his sons safety under Galerius, but Galerius refuses to release him from his court. What can his father do? Constantine runs away to Gaul to rejoin his father. Together they go to England to defeat Picts.

On 25 July 306 in York, England, his father dies. His troops declare Constantine Caesar of Britain and Gaul, Constantine accepts this illegal promotion and returns to Trier to consolidate his position in Gaul and the Western Empire and to increase his perceived legitimacy through victorious battles and increase his popularity in that area. Moving swiftly he declares himself against the persecution of Christians, and releases all of them from prison in Gaul. This brought him great popularity. “Here was a religion that might work for him.” he thought, and remembered the willing-ness and courage of those Christians he had witnessed being slaughtered under his mentor Diocletian.

He then attacks barbarians across the Rhine, to show ‘the might is right’ side of his rule. The kings of these barbarians heterodynamic tribes are captured and then killed in games by wild beasts.

In October 312 At Miluvian Bridge he marches on Rome to remove Maxentius, another usurper emperor who has taken over the majority of the Empire and Rome itself, during this time.

It is here that Christianity becomes Constantine’s stated religion for it is at the Miluvian Bridge that he has a vision, as he is about to ride into battle and kill his own people, for his own glory. Eusebius records his vision as, ‘a blazing light in the heavens, that formed the shape of a cross in the sky’.

Geologist Dr. Iain Stewart in his BBC One series- Journeys From the Centre of the Earth sheds some light on the possible truth of this vision that I feel obliged to incorporate before we look at the evidence regarding this visions truth.

Dr.Stewart cites an Italian legend of this same vision from a pagan perspective. A Tribe worshipping Cybele is recorded as having a festival in October 312 in which men dressed as satyrs with virgin girls dancing around them. They too saw a new star shining in the sky, getting nearer and nearer, until the ground shook violently and the dancers were knocked out cold. This folklore dates from 4th century and could be proof of Constantine’s vision. But of course not of its subsequent authored meaning.

Was it a comet? Well, 30,000 tons of space debris falls on our planet each year- these are shooting stars- meteors that completely burn up in the sky. If big enough to survive it is a meteorite. They produce a very particular type of dent on the Earth’s surface. An explosion on the ground that makes a round crater surrounded by debris, that falls close to the whole. In 2003 a group of scientists found a lake just across the mountains from this legends birth place, which was created around 4th century. Some geologists however think that this crater is in fact a giant ditch made by farmers?

In regards to the vision of the cross, the meteor impact would have created a Mushroom cloud, through which, illuminated by the light from the burning up of the meteorite as it entered the atmosphere, there could have manifested a cross of light in the sky.

Whatever the truth behind this now pagan and Christian ‘vision of God’, God picks a side and it is Constantines. For the Christians in the army this is inspiring, whilst the rest were persuaded that the emperors God would bring victory, maintaining cohesion through the power of the imperial cult instead. This victory gave the troops a powerful feeling of a new God being victorious against an old god, and Constantine is now Augustus of the Western Empire. Christianity is one step closer to taking Rome, but the Eastern Empire still stands.

In the east Galerius has died and been succeeded by a general Licinius who Constantine now marries his sister to in good old familist nepotistic heterodynamic mafia-like style.

Whilst in Rome he woos the public with vast building projects of public works- and holds a triumph for himself, building what will be, the last triumphal arch of Rome.

So is this Christian Constantine whilst still in possession of only the Western Empire proclaiming Rome Christian or is he keeping the pagan gods happy in some way too? Well whilst still remaining the chief priest of pagan belief, he then took on the role as head of the Christian church where he is expected to have a view and to arbitrate the hierarchy of this new Church. In other words he is either a hypocrite i.e. an actor using the Christians to gain power or perhaps more kindly he is just unaware that Christ is any different from the Logos that the Pagans have been worshipping anyway and sees no paradox in his roles as Pagan Ruler and Christian Ruler, whilst also being Pagan god, and Christian (conduit of God) the High Priest. Maybe talking to himself, through himself, about how he was a false pagan god and therefore undeserving of the authority and supernatural powers vested in him, whilst also being the conduit of the true God expected to set up the hierarchy of the Catholic Church through the authority of the vision and victories given to him by God in defeating the pagans who worshipped him as a god was a conversation that he felt able to hold with himself without any niggle of hypocrisy. Let us see how this god/conduit of God proceeds and judge him thusly, under the question, ‘Who Benefits’?

Determined to unite the Roman world Constantine breaks his pact with Licinius and marches on him. Through his role as champion of the Christian church he is being recognised by people in the East, where the threat of the Persians looms large, who hope that he will come to them.

At Adrianople he is wounded in the thigh, but still leads men to victory. Licinius withdraws to Byzantium where he is defeated and executed. It is a dirty civil war, seen as Christian crusade but really it is a ‘brutal unnecessary war’ against a good eastern emperor, it is, ‘a cynical piece of power grabbing cloaked in Christian terms’.

03: Seizing Power

His accession to power was, unsurprisingly, the result of his military victory over his rivals. In 305, Galerius became Augustus in the East and Constantius Chlorus in the West. For their respective Caesares they took Maximinus Daia and Severus. But in 306 the death of Constantius Chlorus (from natural causes) prompted the army in Britain to proclaim his son Constantine emperor. Reacting against this, the praetorians in Rome chose Maxentius, the son of Maximian, while Severus was assassinated. The following year, Maximian came out of retirement to take up office again.

Galerius arranged a conference at Carnuntum (308). That gave rise to the constitution of the Second Tetrarchy, which left the East to Galerius and Maximinus Daia, and entrusted the West to Constantine and a newcomer, Licinius. Maximian and Maxentius, however, maintained their claims, and Domitius Alexander declared his own in Africa. Thus there were then seven emperors. The inevitable consequence of the Tetrarchy, this Heptarchy closely resembled anarchy.

Murder clarified the issue of succession. Maximian was the first to die, in 310, followed by Domitius Alexander and Galerius. In 312, in the battle of the Milvian Bridge (today’s Ponte Molle on the Tiber), but in fact at Saxa Rubra, Constantine defeated Maxentius, and a victory at Adrianople in 313 gave Licinius success over Daia. In 324 Constantine defeated Licinius in the battle of Adrianople, and re-established the rule of one.” (Le Glay:2009:478-79)

In Byzantium Constantine decides to build his new capital of the Roman Empire, and this he renames Constantinople, not Christendom where he builds a massive statue of himself, not Christ, to be housed in a Christian church where the classical world’s art treasures are housed. However as a power-broker he knows no-one in the East and has no contacts or political command in the Republic, and so he uses Christianity as another way of taking power by reciprocating to Christians of power as a technique of stabilising his own power structures.

Once these power structures are in place he attempts to bring the Roman senators over to his new capital in the East but they refuse. They have seen three other  ‘new Capitals’ arise and fall from such new emperors and are not at all convinced that this one will last any longer than these did. But regardless of the powerless Roman Senate the power of Rome is unmistakably moving to the East.

“The vast majority of his subjects are not Christians, he cannot force them to become one so he uses benefits. Pagans are not persecuted but Christian communities are rewarded and individual Christians are given prominent positions in the hierarchy. “It was a potent force for unification…placing himself alongside the Son of God”-Dr Chris Kelly- university of Cambridge.

‘Constantine didn’t think of Christianity as being wishy washy turn the other cheek. He turned to Christianity to consolidate his power by making it the heart of the empire. Constantine made Sunday, the day of the Sun, a holiday but at court maintained a Christian image. No-one really knows if he was Christian or not, but he use to harangue his senate with hell threats if they didn’t obey him, as this was more powerful than telling them that he would punish them’. I Caesar- The men who ruled the Roman Empire. BBC Documentaries

“From these vague and indefinite expressions of piety, three suppositions may be deduced, of a different, but not of an incompatible nature. The mind of Constantine might fluctuate between the Pagan and the Christian religions. According to the loose and complying notions of Polytheism, he might acknowledge the God of the Christians as one of the many deities who composed the hierarchy of heaven. Or perhaps he might embrace the philosophic and pleasing idea that, notwithstanding the variety of names, of rites, and of opinions, all the sects and all the nations of mankind are united in the worship of the common Father and Creator of the universe.

But the counsels of princes are more frequently influenced by views of temporal advantage than by considerations of abstract and speculative truth. The partial and increasing favour of Constantine may naturally be referred to the esteem which he entertained for the moral character of the Christians; and to a persuasion that the propagation of the gospel would inculcate the practice of private and public virtue. Whatever latitude an absolute monarch may assume in his own conduct, whatever indulgence he may claim for his own passions, it is undoubtedly his interest that all his subjects should respect the natural and civil obligations of society. But the operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice. Their power is insufficient to prohibit all that they condemn, nor can they always punish the actions which they prohibit. The legislators of antiquity had summoned to their aid the powers of education and of opinion. But every principle which had once maintained the vigour and purity of Rome and Sparta was long since extinguished in a declining and despotic empire. Philosophy still exercised her temperate sway over the human mind, but the cause of virtue derived very feeble support from the influence of the Pagan superstition. Under these discouraging circumstances, a prudent magistrate might observe with pleasure the progress of a religion, which diffused among the people a pure, benevolent, and universal system of ethics, adapted to every duty and every condition of life; recommended as the will and reason of the Supreme Deity, and enforced by the sanction of eternal rewards or punishments. The experience of Greek and Roman history could not inform the world how far the system of national manners might be reformed and improved by the precepts of a divine revelation; and Constantine might listen with some confidence to the flattering, and indeed reasonable, assurance of Lactantius. The eloquent apologist seemed firmly to expect, and almost ventured to promise, that the establishment of Christianity would restore the innocence and felicity of the primitive age; that the worship of the true God would extinguish war and dissension among those who mutually considered themselves as the children of a common parent; that every impure desire, every angry or selfish passion, would be restrained by the knowledge of the gospel; and that the magistrates might sheathe the sword of justice among a people who would be universally actuated by the sentiments of truth and piety, of equity and moderation, of harmony and universal love.

The passive and unresisting obedience which bows under the yoke of authority, or even of oppression, must have appeared, in the eyes of an absolute monarch, the most conspicuous and useful of the evangelic virtues. The primitive Christians derived the institution of civil government, not from the consent of the people, but from the decrees of heaven. The reigning emperor, though he had usurped the sceptre by treason and murder, immediately assumed the sacred character of vice-regent of the Deity. To the Deity alone he was accountable for the abuse of his power; and his subjects were indissolubly bound, by their oath of fidelity, to a tyrant who had violated every law of nature and society. The humble Christians were sent into the world as sheep among wolves; and, since they were not permitted to employ force, even in the defence of their religion, they should be still more criminal if they were tempted to shed the blood of their fellow-citizens in disputing the vain privileges, or the sordid possessions, of this transitory life….

They might add that the throne of the emperors would be established on a fixed and permanent basis, if all their subjects, embracing the Christian doctrine, should learn to suffer and to obey.” (Gibbon:1998:371-3)

04: The founding of Constantinople

‘330 AD 11 May at the New Hippodrome at not Byzantine but Constantinople. It was a dedication ceremony to a new god- Christ. statues of Deified emperors were paraded around the Hippodrome. Why did he switch from Rome, because ‘he was a pragmatic power broker’ and thriving heart of Rome was now in the East whilst its chief enemy Persia was also there. So straddling Europe and Asia was perfect place to rule both. But that wasn’t the only reason. Constantines dramatic conversion to Christianity gave him the chance to make a Christian city outside of Rome.’ Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities- Simon Sebag Montefiore: BBC One

The emperor gave his name to the new city he founded in the East, Constantinople. The decision had been made in 324, and the inauguration took place on May 11, 330. The new town, covering the former Byzantium on the shores of the Bosporus strait, was laid out in a purposeful imitation of Rome: it lay on seven hills, was divided into 14 regions, and possessed a forum, a capitol, and a Senate….there should be no misconception over the significance of the foundation of Constantinople. It was not an act of public benefaction, or an aesthetic choice, but the result of a careful consideration of a profound change: the Empire’s centre of gravity had shifted eastward in every area: politics, economy, religion, culture.” (Le Glay:2009:480-81)

Acting in the manner of the Imperial Cult that we have studied previously Constantine, in like manner as to Alexander the Great and his father Philip of Macedon, now starts to become Persian in his dress and temperament, donning purple crowns, surrounding his court with eunuchs, and regalia to praise himself and advertise his authority. Through these techniques of power, ‘Emperors have become elevated above their subjects, by this increasing mass of courtiers, who are there to keep this distance’. Upon his death Constantine will be buried In Nicomedia, clothed in opulent silks that gleamed white, refusing to ever be clothed in purple again, he is baptised on his death bed. Buried with 12 others representing Christ’s apostles:

“The Imperial city of Constantinople was, in some measure, raised at the expense, and was adorned with the spoils, of the opulent temples of Greece and Asia; the sacred property was confiscated; the statues of gods and heroes were transported, with rude familiarity, among a people who considered them as objects, not of adoration, but of curiosity: the gold and silver were restored to circulation; and the magistrates, the bishops, and the eunuchs, improved the fortunate occasion of gratifying at once their zeal, their avarice, and their resentment. But these depredations were confined to a small part of the Roman world; and the provinces had been long since accustomed to endure the same sacrilegious rapine, from the tyranny of princes and proconsuls, who could not be suspected of any design to subvert the established religion.” (Gibbon:1998:446)

“What were his motives? In the 4th century the greatest Christian monument built by Constantine was a mausoleum and a church. Around the tomb were 12 niches for the apostles tombs and bang in the middle was a thirteenth tomb- his own sarcophagus… There is a theory that he was trying to set himself up to be Christ himself, and his own son had him moved from this central position in order to stop the protests to this. Controversial but may be true.” Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities- Simon Sebag Montefiore: BBC One

“Jones’s views on this subject are of the greatest interest. The Later Roman Empire, in his opinion, was marked by an exceptional degree of social mobility. In the Eastern Empire, this social mobility favoured the growth of a loyal administrative class; while, in the West, this mobility was brought to a halt by the power of the senatorial aristocracy, who, by the middle of the fifth century, enjoyed a monopoly of high office. The amazing spread of Christianity after the conversion of Constantine illustrates this clearly: for this, ‘the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects’, is now seen to coincide with a regrouping of the Roman social hierarchy around the Imperial court.

Continued study of the ‘speed’ and the ‘area’ of such mobility is not only vital to our understanding of the general ‘sensitivity’ of the upper classes of the Empire to the initiative of the Emperor: it affects our view of the religion and culture of the age; it can be invoked to explain both the ‘classicizing’ of Christianity, and the corresponding cheapening of classical culture as a mark of status hastily acquired by the new professional classes.” (Brown:1972:63-4)

In the description of Constantine’s burial we can see that conflicting natures of Constantines roles in life, was he a god or was he the Son of God or was he not a god but a conduit of God? Through the tradition of the pagan imperial cult as clearly exemplified in the purple robes he donned in life to the white robes that usurped these robes in death to reflect those of Christ in the tomb, we can see this conflict. As to the twelve apostles and the twelve gods of the zodiac that surrounded Philip II of Macedon in a pagan theatre, back to the zodiac of Noah and Ziusudra in the oldest story every recorded- the Epic of Gilgamesh, we merely return to the previous chapters point about the Nature of the Logos and of this paradox that Constantine typified in every aspect of his being, or at least ‘act’.

At Rome Constantine has his eldest son Crispus, and his wife Fausta secretly executed as they are challenging his rule. He also instigates laws on adultery and on marriage because Crispus and Fausta had been having an affair.

‘In the Western Empire the Barbarians are becoming organised. Aged 58 Constantine takes army across the Danube and defeats Goths and Dalmatians. Those who surrender on his terms are enrolled in Roman way of life, given land, and he takes the sons of these new rulers into the army- in a policy of assimilation. This was a very popular policy because people wanted to become assimilated. In fact more people than Rome could take into its circle. They would actually hang around the gates of Rome awaiting assimilation. This meant more soldiers, and more administrators, etc, to be paid as they become a part of Rome, and this changed the balance of labourers to the unproductive labour of administrators and soldiers. ‘So the system he creates has within itself the seeds of its own destruction.’ I Caesar- The men who ruled the Roman Empire. BBC Documentaries

His struggle now is to unify both a Roman and Christian empire. In just 70 years Rome itself would be sacked by the Goths- a people who are Christians but not Romans.

Now that we have seen the life of Constantine I wish to show the way that the Roman classical concept of the world met with the new Christian world once Christianity came to power from its heretical history in Roman thrownness of their world? How did the pagan Senate of Rome react to the Christians who were favoured by Constantine? How did the Church see itself now that it had the stick-wielding authority of arms by which to assert itself in the worlding of the World?

To do this it is easiest to look at the life of Augustine and the formation of the Church itself:

05: Augustine sires a Violent Church from a Violent Empire

“The historian of Donatism must start, not with the social history of North Africa, but with the implications of two distinct views of the role of a religious group in society: the one, that the group exists above all to defend its identity- to preserve a divinely-given law, Machabaeico more; the other, that it may dominate, ‘baptize’ and absorb, by constraint if need be, the society in which it is placed. The controversy of the age of Augustine decided in which of these two forms Christianity would come to predominate in Western Europe: ‘if it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became the religion for the world’ (Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, II, 343).” (Brown:1972:338)

“ ‘Classical’ political theory, from the seventeenth century onwards, was based upon a Rational Myth of the State. By myth I mean the habit of extrapolating certain features of experience, isolating them, in abstraction or by imagining an original state in which only those elements were operative, and using the pellucid myth thus created as a means of explaining what should happen today. The tendency, therefore, was to extrapolate a rational man; to imagine how reason, and a necessity assessed by reason, would lead him to found a state; and to derive from this ‘mythical’ rational act of choice, a valid, rational reason for obeying, or reforming, the state as it now is. By contrast, medieval thought, like modern thought, is neither concerned with a myth of the state, nor to base the fact of political obedience upon this myth. Both regard it as impossible to extrapolate and isolate man in such a way. Political society exists concretely: whether because of God, or history, does not matter; it is there. Above all, the link between the individual and the state cannot be limited to a rational obligation. As it exists, in fact, it is mysterious. We are linked to political society by something that somehow escapes our immediate consciousness: by a whole tangled skein of pressures and motives, some rational, many more not so. It is the nature of this tangled skein that perplexed medieval, as it now perplexes modern, thinkers. A man just finds himself in a situation in which men, for all the world like himself, are in a position to kill him, or to order him to kill others. Should this be so? Is it worth it? Is it right? In what circumstances may it be resisted? By what means may it be controlled?” (Brown:1972:26-7)

“It is from this direction that we must approach Augustine’s contribution to the Christian doctrine of passive obedience. He is a man for whom the delusion of self-determination appears as far more dangerous than any tyranny: ‘Hands off yourself’ he says. ‘Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin.’ It is important to note the way in which this obedience is seen to rest on the individual.” (Brown:1972:30)

“A man is humble before his rulers because he is humble before God. His political obedience is a symptom of his willingness to accept all processes and forces beyond his immediate control and understanding. Thus, he can even accept the exercise of power by wicked men.” (Brown:1972:30)

“An acute sense of the spiritual dangers of excessive claims to self-determination lies at the root of Augustine’s doctrine of passive obedience: and it forms a somewhat oppressive feature of his political activities as a bishop. But it is only the negative facet of a positive doctrine. It is the positive doctrine of ordo– of the divine order of the universe- that predominates in the City of God. Man cannot claim complete self-determination because of his place in the divine order of things: in that order, he is tuned to one pitch and to one pitch only.” (Brown:1972:31-2)

“think of highwaymen, tortured because they will not reveal the names of their accomplices. ‘They could not have done this without a great capacity for love’. Augustine is acutely aware of the juxtaposition of these two elements. On the one hand, there is the self-evidence of a divine order of supreme beauty, to be contemplated in nature and in the absolute certainties of the laws of thought: on the other hand, the fact that, in this beautiful universe, the human soul tends to disperse itself in a baffling multiplicity of intense but partial loves. Such human loves only hint at a lost harmony; and it is the re-establishment of this harmony, by finding man’s proper place and rhythm, that constitutes, for Augustine, the sum total of Christian behaviour.

Augustine’s moral thought, therefore, is devoted to the re-establishment of a lost harmony. Because of this, human action is judged in terms of its relations. A good action is one that is undertaken in the light of a relation to a wider framework: the word referre, ‘to refer’, or ‘relate’, is central to Augustine’s discussion of human activity; and for Augustine, of course, this human activity, of whatever kind, can only reach fulfilment when it can take its place in a harmonious whole, where everything is in relation to God.”  (Brown:1972:32-33)

“The Christian subjects to whom he preached, and the Christian officials to whom he wrote advice, were not, for Augustine, ‘natural political animals’; they were men faced with a whole range of aims and objects of love, of which those created by living in political society were only some among many others. They reacted to these aims not because they lived in a particular type of state, but because they were particular types of men. Put briefly, Augustine’s political theory is based upon the assumption that political activity is merely symptomatic: it is merely one way in which men express orientations that lie far deeper in themselves. The Christian obeys the state because he is the sort of man who would not set himself up against the hidden ways of God, either in politics or in personal distress. The Christian ruler rules as he does because he is humble before God, the source of all benefits.

These remarks on the duties of the subject and the quality of the Christian ruler were welcome at the time. They showed that Christian ethics could absorb political life at a moment when pagans had begun to fear that Christianity had proved itself incompatible with Roman statecraft. They influenced the middle ages profoundly, because they provided a totally Christian criterion of political action in an unquestioningly Christian society…Indeed, in Augustine’s opinion, one swallow did not make a summer. When he wrote the City of God, he was convinced of the collective damnation of the human race, with the exception of a small few, predestined to be ‘snatched’ from that ‘damned lump’. The symptoms, therefore, which tend to predominate in his description of human political activity can only be thought of as symptoms of a disease. The roots of this disease go very deep indeed: it is first diagnosed, not even in Adam, but in the Fall of the Angels. The most blatant symptom of this fall is the inversion of the harmonious order established by God.” (Brown:1972:35)

A_As we have seen, the fall, was not settling itself but the nature of alimental communion no longer with Nature/God but with desire, as we could now accumulate possessions, and become possessed by them and not being-in-Being. From there we became being-in-itself, to being-for-others in villages, to being-as-subject in pyramid civilizations whose property rights bore politics and war- the father of everything. So Augustine is right to think of politics as a disease that we are all involved in if we are settlers by the reason of necessity.

“Thus, first the Devil, then Adam, chose to live on their own resources; they preferred their own fortitude, their own created strength, to dependence upon the strength of God. For this reason, the deranged relationships between fallen angels and men show themselves in a constant effort to assert their incomplete power by subjecting others to their will. This is the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate, that was once mentioned in passing by Sallust, as an un-Roman vice, typical of aggressive states, such as Assyria, Babylon and Macedon. It was fastened upon by Augustine as the universal symptom par excellence of all forms of deranged relationships, among demons as among men. Seen in this bleak light, the obvious fact of domination, as a feature of political society, could make the world of states appear as a vast mental hospital, ranging from the unhealthy self-control of the early Romans to the folie de grandeur of a Babylonian tyrant. This was a bitter pill, which many lay rulers were forced to swallow in later ages. But, as always with Augustine, the outward expression of this ‘lust’ in the form of organized states is merely a symptom…A libido, for Augustine, was a desire that had somehow got out of control: the real problem, therefore, was why it had got out of control, what deeper dislocation this lack of moderation reflected…

We emphasize this aspect of Augustine’s thought because we tend to treat the state in isolation. But this is something which Augustine never did, at any time. The object of his contemplation, the aspect of human activity that he sought to make intelligible and meaningful, is not the state: it is something far, far wider. For him, it is the saeculum. And we should translate this vital word, not by ‘the world’, so much as by ‘existence’- the sum total of human existence as we experience it in the present, as we know it has been since the fall of Adam, and as we know it will continue until the Last Judgement.

For Augustine, this saeculum is a profoundly sinister thing. It is a penal existence, marked by the extremes of misery and suffering, by suicide, madness, by ‘more diseases than any book of medicine can include.’, and by the inexplicable torments of small children.” (Brown:1972:36-7)

A_For scientologists it may be nice to know that this mad-house that by inter-galactic law no alien is allowed to land on Earth in case of infection, that this is not news to Christianity, despite the fact that scientologists are told that Christianity is a part of the brain-washing. It is not Christianity but ignorance of Christianity (admittedly the majority of which comes from Christians themselves) that is the brain-washing- As I am sure scientologists feel about their religion and how it is portrayed to others.

The out of control is the lack of the egoic desire that we have seen drive this desire to culture and war.

“The most obvious feature of man’s life in this saeculum is that it is doomed to remain incomplete. No human potentiality can ever reach its fulfilment in it; no human tension can ever be fully resolved. The fulfilment of the human personality lies beyond it; it is infinitely postponed to the end of time, to the Last Day and the glorious resurrection. Whoever thinks otherwise, says Augustine: ‘understands neither what he seeks, nor what he is who seeks it.’

For Augustine, human perfection demands so much, just because human experience covers so very wide an area, a far wider area than in most ethical thinkers of the ancient world. It includes the physical body: this dying, unruly thing cannot be rejected, it must be brought into its proper place and so renewed. It includes the whole intense world of personal relationships: it can only be realized, therefore in a life of fellowship, in a vita socialis sanctorum. It is inconceivable that such claims can be met in this world; only a morally obtuse man, or a doctrinaire, could so limit the area of human experience as to pretend that its fulfilment was possible in this life. Thus, in opening his Nineteenth Book of the City of God by enumerating and rejecting the 288 possible ethical theories known to Marcus Varro as ‘all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up happiness for themselves actually within the misery of this life.’, Augustine marks the end of classical thought. For an ancient Greek, ethics had consisted of telling a man, not what he ought to do, but what he could do, and hence, what he could achieve. Augustine, in the City of God, told him for what he must live in hope, in faith, in an ardent yearning for a country that is always distant, but made ever-present by the quality of his love, that ‘groans’ for it, Augustine could well be called the first Romantic.” (Brown:1972:38-9)

A_ So for Augustine, being-in-Being, the state that we saw exist for tens of thousands of years is impossible in this world, but that it is only fellowship that can bring human perfection. As we have seen he is therefore right and wrong as it is fellowship that was the point of alimental communion between human-beings and Being in their relationship to God as Wakan- and were met in this world. Unfortunately Catholicism is destined to create autodynamism to defeat the heterodynamism that it encounters in the world and not homodynamism. I do not think that this is romantic but tragic. My theory is romantic when seen through the lense of ignorance (common sense of human-being today) that we have now polished and removed, augustine’s is tragic because it states that life is pointless once you have taken the sacraments of the church and then become politically obedient to evil rulers causing suffering and scapegoats all around you in this homodynamic wakan spirit, the Greeks is tragic because it does the same thing- not for its own salvation, but for its own holiness, or wholeness, which results always in the nemesis of lack ever-increasing.

“Augustine’s attempts deliberately and persistently to see in human society the expression of the most basic and fundamental human needs….

He finds this fundamental need in the human desire for peace…This pax, for Augustine, means far more than tranquillity, unity and order. These things are only preconditions for its attainment. For Augustine, the obverse of peace is tension- the unresolved tension between body and soul and man and man, of which this life is so full…His concern with peace as something absolutely fundamental to human happiness made him welcome any feature of organized society that might at least cancel out some of those tensions of which he was so intensely conscious.

For this reason, Augustine could accept the domination of man over man that had arisen from the Fall. This domination at least cancelled out certain tensions- although at a terrible cost, as anyone who has witnessed judicial torture and executions, would admit if he had any sense of human dignity. But at least an ordered hierarchy of established powers can canalize and hold in check the human lust for domination and vengeance. For Augustine, like Hobbes, is a man for whom a sense of violence forms the firmest boundary stone of his political thought.” (Brown:1972:40-1)

A_ So Peace is a desire produced by war which is nothing more than desire organised, but that is okay because violence curbed- war is better than random violence- warfare. Therefore Romes Empire is better than no Empire. And a Catholic Empire will be better than no Empire.

“The weakness of Augustine’s position is, of course, that it implies a very static view of political society. It is quite content merely to have some of the more painful tension removed. It takes an ordered political life for granted. Such an order just happens among fallen men. Largely because he feels he can take it for granted, Augustine can dismiss it. For him, it is a ‘peace of Babylon’ that should only be ‘used’ by the citizens of the Heavenly City…. He therefore, rejects as too narrow the classical definition of the res publica: such a definition would make it appear as if political society were a mere structure designed to protect certain rights and interests. For Augustine, this misses the point. Men, because they are men, just do cohere, and work out some form of normative agreement- an ordinata concordia. What cannot be taken for granted is the quality of this ordered life; and, for Augustine, this means the quality of the motives and aims of its individual members…. ‘it is a better or a worse people as it is united in loving higher or lower things.’

…It hits upon a fundamental motive: dilectio, which, for Augustine, stands for the orientation of the whole personality, its deepest wishes and its basic capacity to love, and so it is far from being limited to purely rational pursuit of ends. It is dynamic; it is a criterion of quality that can change from generation to generation.” (Brown:1972:41-2)

A_When this love turns into self-love (being-in-itself) or familist-love (being-for-others) or political-love (being-as-subject) then it is a lower thing than being-in-Being, i.e. not fallen, whereupon the relationship to beings and Being are one.

“Today, perhaps, we can appreciate the importance of this shift of emphasis. Previously, it could be assumed that political theory was a matter of structure, in an almost mechanical sense. In discussing this structure, we had tended to analyse it into its component parts, and, hence, to isolate the individual on the one hand, and the state, on the other, as the only two parts whose relations are relevant to thought on political society. In fact, this isolation is a deliberately self-limiting myth. So much of our modern study in sociology and social psychology has shown the degree to which political obedience is, in fact, secured, and political society coheres by the mediation of a third party, of a whole half-hidden world of irrational, semi-conscious and conscious elements, that can include factors as diverse as childhood attitudes to authority, crystallized around abiding inner figures, half-sensed images of security, of greatness, of the good life, and, on the conscious plane, the acceptance of certain values. These make up an orientation analogous to Augustine’s dilectio.

…Viewed in such a way, the state becomes a symbol: it is one of the many moulds through which men might be led to express needs and orientations that lie deep in themselves; and the expression of these needs through an organized community provides a far more tenacious bond of obligation than the purely rational agreements of a social contract.” (Brown:1972:43)

“In later centuries, in a society where the external role of the Church will become more explicit, Augustine’s subtle, dynamic doctrine in which values form a field of forces, linking what men really want in their hearts with what they want from a state, will settle down as a static hierarchy of duties….

…We are left with a dichotomy: an acute awareness of the actual condition of man in this saeculum; and a yearning for a City far beyond it. Augustine never overcame this dichotomy.” (Brown:1972:45)

A_The desires of the state are by its pyramid nature and method of cohesion- money, esteem and power- obliged to create desire in the individual for its own self, and not for the higher Being, by which it derives its authority. In other words, War is innate within a pyramid civilization and hence peace is a desire that is created in order to justify war in order to obtain it. This is Augustine’s naivety about the body politic and the type of animal (spirit) that it is by its very nature. Its dilectio is not Augustine’s dilectio- It is not love but self-love by which the fallen act. To dismiss this is to not understand institutional fundamentals, and hence to see violence as a boundary stone and not a central anchor point of survival of the fittest (the self-love perspective) but as the means to embody harmony (the universal-love perspective)- a boundary stone.

By seeing it as a boundary stone however, Augustine was able to bring violence easily into the arms of the Church, by which it could ‘hold’ its flock- remember that religion means ‘to bind’. It is allegorically meant to mean ‘to bind’ as in the Nature of the Vine of Christ or the Ivy of Dionysus that climbs ever higher towards the light together in harmony, as we climb the tree of knowledge (ka-ba-lah), but it comes to mean under Augustine ‘to bind’ to ‘The Church’, ‘the Catholic Church-in-itself’. This meant that the Universe that contained pagans could not be housed within a universe (Catholic) that did not worship the Logos as Christ The son of God, because the boundary had been laid down by his theology and it’s first stone cast across this liminal invisible circle was, you guessed it, violence in the name of peace, for our sakes, in order to attain political obedience without question even to evil rulers. Augustine’s nick-name was ‘The Prince of Persecutors’:

“Above all, they had suppressed pagans and heretics. Augustine was deeply involved in this last change. He is the only bishop in the Early Church whom we can actually see evolving, within ten years, towards an unambiguous belief that Christian emperors could protect the Church by suppressing its rivals. He is the only writer who wrote at length in defence of religious coercion; and he did this with such cogency and frequency that he had been called le prince et patriarche des persécuteurs.” (Brown:1972:44)

A_What therefore were the repercussions of Augustine’s thoughts to how the Church subsequently behaved, and how did this contribute to the fall of Rome itself through the increase of violence in the Roman Empire? :

“In the West, Christian opinion, in the late fourth century, was prepared neither to respect those who kept the barbarian outside the Empire, nor to tolerate and absorb the barbarian, once inside. Western Christianity was not ‘pacifist’. Rather, it became respectable through crystallizing the latent anti-militarism of the civilian population: this is already evident in the ‘senatorial’ apologetic of Lactantius. Unlike the medieval Byzantine Empire, Western society of the early Middle Ages failed notably to find an honourable place for the Roman soldier.

At one and the same time, to be respectable involved keeping the barbarian at arm’s length. Ambrose, for instance, will expect his readers to assume that the barbarian must be a heretic, and the heretic a barbarian….

One cannot resist the impression that it was the new intolerance of the ‘respectable’ Catholicism of the later fourth century which kept the barbarian kingdoms ‘barbaric’: it forced the Visigothic; Vandal and Ostrogothic ruling classes in on themselves; it fostered their Arianism; it checked their ‘detribalization’, and so it ringed the Mediterranean of  the late fifth and sixth centuries with precarious, encapsulated minorities, the regna gentium.” (Brown:1972:53-4)

“the worst catastrophes of the Roman Empire were precipitated by the belief that the primitive methods applied to the inhabitants of the Empire by its bureaucracy- the eternal short-cut of the coercion of social groups (II,1051)- could be successfully extended to embrace the transfer of barbarian populations.” (Brown:1972:59)

“Far from making the processes of Romanization more flexible, the Christian church made them more rigid by equating civilization with orthodoxy. The inhabitants of the Val di Non, for instance, who had become civilized in an old-fashioned way, would be dismissed by the bishop of Trent as a natio Barbara: for though Roman, they had remained pagan (Vigilius of Trent, Epistula I, I P.L. 13,550 D).

This greater inflexibility played a disastrous role in the relations of the Empire with the barbarians. In the fourth century, the barbarian chieftain could be accepted without comment on becoming Romanized….The policy by which the Emperor Theodosius hoped to save the Empire from the Gothic menace assumed that the bridge between the barbarian world and the Roman was still open: the rank and file of the tribesmen would be deprived of their leaders and would be controlled by a Gothic aristocracy, skilfully seduced by the offer of full participation in the benefits of Roman civilized life….But just such a policy was being sabotaged by the intolerance of the Catholic bishops patronized by the same Emperor: for a bishop, orthodoxy was the only bridge over which a barbarian could enter civilization; and in the eyes of John Chrysostom, a Goth who was fully identified with the Roman order by pagan standards but who had remained an Arian, might just as well have stayed in his skins, across the Danube.” (Brown:1972:90-91)

“But, given the intellectual equipment which Dr Frend describes in the Greek apologists- a robust faith that, in a stable and civilized community, the tensions between religious belief and secular peace can be reconciled- it is not surprising that the most lasting legacy of Byzantine ecclesiastical statecraft should have been the idea of the Peace of the Church…

In Western Europe, the propounders of the idea of the Church, and, consequently, the idea of the Christianized society, were less certain that such tensions could be resolved, and, for that reason, were more aggressive: a church that always thought of itself as a separate elite could either be persecuted or dominant’ and the world outside it, regarded either as actively hostile or as inferior, as a backward colony to be ruled firmly, with a heavy, guilt-laden paternalism. Augustine provides the alchemy that turned the persecuted elite of Cyprian into the persecuting elite of later times. In the West, therefore, the Christian society will always be pushing against its frontiers: a distinctive idea of the Church, held in varying degrees of crudity, blesses the impingement of Western Europe on the outside world in the Crusade, in the Reconquista, in the constant pressure against the pagans in Eastern Europe and along the shores of the Baltic…Not surprisingly, the catechism which Augustine wrote to aid a Carthaginian priest in absorbing demoralized pagans after the destruction of their great temples in 399- a catechism in which the ‘gathered’ church of Cyprian has been subtly transposed into the triumphant elite of the age of Theodosius the Great- forms the basis of the first catechism published by the Spaniards in the New World.” (Brown:1972:92-3)

A_we shall see this catechism’s dynamic repercussions in the New World where people of Wakan are currently living, and will be until 1492, later on.

06: Mani and his Daemon – Remember the Fate of Socrates and his Daemon or Christ and his Angels?

“The condemnation of the wisest and most virtuous of the Pagans, on account of their ignorance or disbelief of the divine truth, seems to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age. But the primitive church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species. A charitable hope might perhaps be indulged in favour of Socrates, or some other sages of antiquity, who had consulted the light of reason before that of the gospel had arisen. But it was unanimously affirmed that those who, since the birth or the death of Christ, had obstinately persisted in the worship of the daemons, neither deserved, nor could expect, a pardon from the irritated justice of the Deity. These rigid sentiments, which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony.” (Gibbon:1998:260-1)

“For Cumont, Manichaeism was the direct successor of Mithraism in the Western world.

The general reassessment of the nature of Manichaeism, followed by the discovery of the Coptic Manichaean documents in the Fayyūm in Egypt has made in increasingly difficult to represent Manicheanism as a development of Iranian religion. The Manichees entered the Roman Empire, not as a final version of the Mages Hellenisés, but at the behest of a man who claimed to be an ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’: the intended to supersede Christianity, not to spread the scaevas leges Persarum. Diocletian had made the mistake, pardonable in a Roman if not in a modern historian of Near Eastern culture, of treating Persian-controlled Mesopotamia tout court as ‘Persia’.

Mani belongs where he said he belonged, to the ‘land of Babylon’…He looks back to the Gnostic Christianity of Osrhoene: his dialogue is with Marcion and Bardasian of Edessa; Zoroaster is a distant figure to him.” (Brown:1972:96-7)

“We know three of the most important things about Mani. He was a missionary: not for nothing did he borrow the Pauline title of ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’ for his letters. He was deeply preoccupied with the problem of national boundaries. He believed that he had founded a universal religion: unlike Christianity and Zoroastrianism, he would be able to spread the ‘hope of life’ in East and West alike. East had been East, and West had been West; and only in Mani had the twain met. He was a man with a daemon. From the age of twelve, he had acted on the prompting of his ‘Twin Spirit’. The final distillation of religious truth- the Holy Ghost that had been promised three centuries before Christ- had descended in him. With this belief he sent his disciples to East and West, and he himself lived a life of great missionary journeys.

Now, the interest of Mani’s journeys is that, radiating from Mesopotamia, they usually strike inland, into the traditional world of the Iranian plateau: only once did he hover on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Socially, he seems to have impinged intimately on the Iranian governing class: he acted on the fringes of the Sassanian royal family; he converted client kings, and female members of the Iranian aristocracy. Thus for thirty years Mani had preached, performed exorcisms, conjured visions near the heart of traditional Persian society, which knew him as ‘the doctor from the land of Babylon’. When he was executed, in 276, it was at the instigation of the Zoroastrian clergy, led by the modedhan modedh, Karter, on the charge of having provoked apostasies from Zoroastrianism. Mani was not the last religious leader in the Sassanian Empire to suffer for claiming that his was a universal faith, and that the ‘Good Religion’ of Zoroaster was both demonic and parochial.” (Brown:1972:99-100)

“First, the Manichean religion as based on a rigid distinction between the perfect, the Elect (men and women), and the rank-and-file, the Hearers. The sancta ecclesia of Mani was limited to the Elect. The Elect secured the salvation of the Hearers, by forgiving their sins and by purging their souls through entirely vicarious rituals. The Hearers sheltered and fed the Elect. Manichaeism, therefore, was a group with an unmistakable inner core: the Elect were vagrant, studiously ill-kempt, they carried exotic books, they were committed to elaborate liturgies and fenced in with drastic taboos. The Hearers, by contrast, were indistinguishable from their environment. The Manichaeism of the Hearers- of the ‘Fellow-Travellers’. Augustine and his friends were only Hearers….

A religion that has to shelter behind patrons and half-adepts is an interesting phenomenon. Strange alliances could occur. Symmachus, the pagan, will choose Augustine, the Manichean ‘Hearer’ for the chair of rhetoric in Milan at the behest of the Manichees.” (Brown:1972:108-9)

“By the end of the fourth century, therefore, Manichaeism was already shorn of an intelligentsia that had come in equal numbers from pagan and Christian families. African Manicheaism, for instance, was left with a rump of hard-core Electi, and with Hearers drawn exclusively from the fringes of the average Christian communities. The effect of persecution in the Christian Roman Empire, therefore, was to increase the ‘Christianization’ of Manichaeism, by encouraging occasional conformity and by cutting off its access to a large pool of post-pagan intellectuals.

Secondly, Manichaeism became a problem increasingly as a form of crypto-Christianity. Mani had trumped Christ: the Manichean missionary had to prove it by dogging the Christian community; and his converts would tend to remain prudently hidden under the shadow of the Catholic Church….

Hence the inquisitorial atmosphere accompanying the suppression of Manichaeism and that other form of Gnostic crypto-Christianity, Priscillianism: we hear of agents provocateurs (one zealous priest suggested adultery as a fine way of obtaining the names of heretics). The discovery of Manichees would be accompanied by lurid public ‘confession’, before the bishop, throned in the apse of the his basilica, like a Justice of the Peace….

The Christian Church appears as a labour-saving institution for the Roman state. For the problem of identifying the Manichee and of absorbing the convert devolved on the Christian clergy…

In Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, in 529, the problem of the converted Manichee was still being handled exclusively by the traditional police-mechanisms of the lay world: the bishop is peripheral. In the West, the duty of identifying and absorbing heretics had long devolved on the clergy. It is a reminder that the more, thoroughly ‘Christianized’ early Byzantine Empire will never be ‘clericized’ as rapidly as the less Christian but under-governed West.” (Brown:1972:110-12)

07: Assassination is not as powerful as Sorcery – Bureaucracy is more powerful than Sorcery – Byzantium

“This spread of education did not prevent the proliferation of superstitious beliefs, a staple of Roman civilization for centuries. Many lives were ruled by astrology, which claimed that humans were ruled by the movements of heavenly bodies. The observation of nature also encouraged a belief in magic, which claimed to be able to compel the gods through the action of spirits. Alchemy sought to transform base metals into gold. Practices of theurgy (“divine-work”) included meditation and invocation of the divine, and promised miracles and apparitions. Spell-casting tablets multiplied during the fourth century. At a mystical ceremony a magic text was inscribed on a papyrus, or a tablet of wood or metal, mostly lead, and then placed in a tomb or shaft. These tablets reveal what preoccupied people’s thoughts- love, revenge, winning on the horses, and bumper harvests.” (Le Glay:2009:525-26)

A_ Magic becomes being-for-itself as a lens and fades from reality as an impersonal invisible force of Nature, it is now a possession to be seen from the perspective of our own nature. The very stars move in order to rule us, not to commune with us alimentally. Darpan. The alchemy of the inner world, transforming our base metals as described by Socrates into gold ones, now becomes the alchemy of the outer world, an external jihad upon Nature itself, where the value of ones life is to transform not through Promethean fire, but through physical fire, Nature itself, to our purposes, through our man-made arts. Alchemy becomes the etymology of chemistry whereas it used to be the root of religion. Progress in a tower of Babyl. What do they want from their genies- love of the self, revenge of a hated other- Peace and war, respectively, gain without effort as the aristocracy have achieved for themselves- hope, and no longer to worry about having enough to eat, as the aristocracy have achieved for themselves- fear.

“It is here that we find a situation which has been observed both to foster sorcery accusations and to offer scope for resort to sorcery. This is when two systems of power are sensed to clash within the one society. On the one hand, there is articulate power, power defined and agreed upon by everyone (and especially by its holders!): authority vested in precise persons; admiration and success gained by recognized channels. Running counter to this there may be other forms of influence less easy to pin down- inarticulate power: the disturbing intangibles of social life; the imponderable advantages of certain groups; personal skills that succeed in a way that is unacceptable or difficult to understand. Where these two systems overlap, we may expect to find the sorcerer.

In some areas, where competition is not easily resolved by normal means, we find actual resort to sorcery. Far more important, however, in a situation where articulate and inarticulate power clash, we find greater fear of sorcery, and the reprobation and hunting-down of the sorcerer. In this situation, the accuser is usually the man with the Single Image. For him, there is one, single, recognized way of making one’s way in the world. In rejecting sorcery, such a man has rejected any additional source of power. He has left the hidden potentialities of the occult untouched. He is castus. The sorcerer, by contrast, is seen as the man invested with the Double Image….

To fear and suppress the sorcerer is an extreme assertion of the Single Image. Many societies that have sorcery-beliefs do not go out of their way to iron out the sorcerer. The society, or the group within the society, that actually acts on its fear is usually the society that feels challenged, through conflict, to uphold an image of itself in which everything that happens, happens through articulate channels only- where power springs from vested authority, where admiration is gained by conforming to recognized norms of behaviour, where the gods are worshipped in public, and where wisdom is the exclusive preserve of the traditional educational machine.

The best-documented aspect of this problem is the conflict in the governing class of the Later Roman Empire between fixed vested roles, on the one hand, and the holders of ambiguous positions of personal power, on the other. This personal power was based largely on skills, such as rhetoric, which, in turn, associated the man of skill with the ill-defined, inherited prestige of the traditional aristocracies…

To take the governing class in its narrow sense and to view it from the hub onwards- that is, to analyse purges based largely on accusations of sorcery in the reigns of Constantius II, Valentinian I and Valens. The scene is usually the inner ring of the court: it is played out among officials, ex-officials, local notables. All of these men would have had personal contact with the emperor as a man, and not only as a remote figure of authority.

To rationalize such accusations as ‘smears’ is only half the truth. They certainly were not pretexts for suppressing political conspiracies. Ammianus is firm on this point: the emperor knew only too well what an assassination plot was, and suppressed it as such. Rather, these accusations indicate very faithfully a situation where organized political opposition was increasingly unthinkable: the days of a ‘senatorial opposition’, able to make itself felt by assassination, were gone forever; the civilian governing class was overtly homogeneous, and stridently loyalist. Thus, resentments and anomalous power on the edge of the court could be isolated only by the more intimate allegation- sorcery. Indeed, seen from the point of view of the emperor’s image of himself, some sorcery was even a necessity: for to survive sorcery was to prove, in a manner intelligible to all Late Roman men, that the vested power of the emperor, his fatum, was above the powers of evil directed by mere human agents. A sorcerer’s attack, indeed, in an obligatory preliminary, in biographies of the time, to demonstrating the divine power that protected the hero, whether this be the divine daemon of the pagan philosopher, Plotinus, or the guardian archangel of St. Ambrose. When we see them in this light, we can appreciate how the sorcery accusations of the fourth century mark a stage of conflict on the way to a greater definition of the secular governing class of the Eastern Empire as an aristocracy of service, formed under an emperor by divine right….

In the fourth century, the boundary between the court and the traditional aristocracy coincided, generally, with a boundary between Christianity and paganism. It is often assumed that to accuse a pagan aristocrat of sorcery was a covert form of religious persecution. (To the Christian, who took for granted that a pagan worshipped demons, it was convenient to assume that he would also manipulate them, in sorcery; and so the burning of books of magic, a traditional police action, is continued, in the Christian period, as a cover for the destruction of much of the religious literature of paganism.)” (Brown:1972:124-6)

“Throughout these accusations, therefore, we have something more than the occult measures which men in a competitive situation undeniably did take to increase their success and crush their rivals: there is an attempt to explain a theme that still puzzles the historian of the Later Empire, the je ne sais quoi of the predominance of an ill-defined aristocracy of culture and inherited prestige, constantly pressing in upon an autocracy whose servants derived their status from membership of a meticulously graded bureaucracy.

Sorcery beliefs in the Later Empire, therefore, may be used like radio-active traces in an X-ray: where these assemble, we have a hint of pockets of uncertainty and competition in a society increasingly committed to a vested hierarchy in church and state….As long as the successes of the charioteers were bound up in the public imagination with the ‘Fortune’ of the city, this usually remote and stable figure (who would be easily assimilated to the unmoved majesty of a Christian archangel) was thrown on to the ‘open market’ by the talents of a star. The charioteer himself was an undefined mediator in urban society: he was both the client of local aristocracies and the leader of organized groups of lower-class fans- and so, at times, a potential figure-head in urban rioting, that nightmare of Late Roman government. Along with athletes and actors, he belonged to the demi-monde- a very important class in the imaginations (and, one would suspect, also in the daily life) of the studiously aristocratic society of the Later Empire. Accusations of sorcery frequently take us from upper-class families into a world where charioteer and sorcerer are intimately associated.

For it is in this demi-monde, in the wide sense, that we find the professional sorcerer. The cultivated man, it was believed, drew his power from absorbing a traditional culture. His soul, in becoming transcendent through traditional disciplines, was above the material world, and so was above sorcery. He did not need the occult. We meet the sorcerer pressing upwards against this rigid barrier, as a man of uncontrolled occult ‘skill’…

It is in this demi-monde, of course, that we meet the Christian Church. Previously, the Church had been the greatest challenge from below to traditional beliefs and organization: the powers of its founders, Jesus and Peter, and of its clergy, were regularly ascribed to sorcery. Moreover, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Church was a group which had harnessed the forces of social mobility to itself more effectively even than the teaching profession: its hierarchy was notable a carrière ouverte aux talents: and it played a decisive role in the ‘democratization’ of culture.

Such a group pulluated saints and sorcerers. (In popular belief, the line between the two was very thin:…Athanasius reaped his due recognition from contemporaries in a reputation for sorcery. The clergy followed their leaders. Sorcery was rife among the Syrian clergy of the fifth century. This is, of course, partly a tribute to their ‘book learning’ and so to their reputation as guardians of the occult. But knowledge of sorcery was more precisely associated with a fluid group. Clients turned to the clergy for the same reason as they had turned to Albicerius: to men in touch with ill-defined ‘skills’, on the penumbra of a dominant educated aristocracy.We shall come, later, to the sequel… We should note, however, in confirmation of this suggestion, that, as Late Roman society grew more stable and defined, in the course of the sixth century, so sorcery accusations seem to have waned…In the West, the triumph of the great landowners ensured that senatorial blood, Episcopal office, and sanctity presented a formidable united front: any form of uncontrolled religious power received short shrift in the circle of Gregory of Tours.” (Brown:1972:128-30)

“It may well be the case that the Christian Church effected a détente in sorcery beliefs in this period. But it did not do this through its repeated and ineffective injunctions against ‘superstitious’ practices: rather, the Christian Church offered an explanation of misfortune that both embraced all the phenomena previously ascribed sorcery, and armed the individual with weapons of satisfying precision and efficacy against its suprahuman agents. I would suggest that this change in the explanation of misfortune coincides with social changes in just those milieux where Christianity became dominant.

To take explanations of misfortune first: When we read the later works of Augustine, written to rally public opinion and deeply in touch with the sentiments of the average Christian, we realize that his doctrine of the punishment of the human race for the sin of Adam has been widened so as to embrace all misfortune. Misfortune, indeed, has eclipsed voluntary sin as the object of the old man’s bleak meditations. Because of Adam’s sin, God had permitted the demons to act as His ‘public executioners’- to use the phrase of an earlier Christian writer. The human race was the ‘plaything of demons’, damage to crops, disease, possession, incongruous behaviour (such as the lapse of holy men), gratuitous accidents, and, as an insistent refrain, the untimely deaths of small children- phenomena that might characterize a society in which the sorcerer had been given carte blanche to wreak his will– are ascribed by Augustine to the abiding anger of God: ‘He has sent upon them the anger of His indignation, indignation and rage and tribulation, and possession by evil spirits.’

So much for the formal statement of views which became more widespread in this period. What one must seize, however, are the deep reasons that would lead a man like Libanius, almost an exact contemporary of Augustine, to react to a bad dream as an omen of ‘(magical) medicines, spells and attacks on my by sorcerers’, while Augustine will say, of the terror of dreams, that they ‘show clearly that, from our first root in Adam, the human race condemned to punishment.’” (Brown:1972:132-3)

A_We have already seen the role and power of the devil raised from that of a mere plaything, under Zoroastrianism of which Manicheaism is a part, and now we have seen the Devils role and power become so great that God has given the worlding over to him and human-beings are its mere plaything. We have already seen however that the devil is nothing more than the ego, as per Christian theology, Gnosticism, and pagan initiatory teaching. So the worlding of the devil is really the ego and the magic of the power of the drama triangle of the pyramid of civilization as its animal spirit is attempted to be controlled by the organisational visible magical power structures of that pyramid of egos. This is why the charioteer, the leader who reigns the power of the animal spirit and directs it towards winning the race, the human race, that goes around around in a hippodrome of hypocrisy in the name of peace, progress, justice, liberty, equality, etc, etc, whilst still needing to feed the army that founded it, maintains it, and karmically destroys it by necessity of reason as it becomes unfit and nature can no longer contain its desires.

“The two reactions may allow us to glimpse two different worlds. Libanius lived most of his life among the well-oriented upper classes of Antioch. When subjected to a misfortune ascribed to sorcery, he knew on whom he might pin blame: he would be blamed by others; he and his colleagues drew their identity from skills common to a traditionalist society. When such professors and civic notables competed among themselves, they trod a narrow stage whose backdrop had changed little. In so stable, well-oriented a world, a man would expect to be certain of his identity: he knew what was expected of him, and he knew that he could live up to these expectations. When an incongruity suddenly appears in his performance, he defends his image of himself by treating it as an intrusive element, placed there, from the outside, by some hostile agent. ‘Misfortune’ of the kind we are discussing is experienced as an attempt, from the outside, to sabotage the ‘good fortune’ to which a man’s conscious control of his environment entitles him. And, in the world of Libanius, it is possible to identify the saboteur in the precise human figure of one’s jealous colleague.

By contrast, the Christian communities in the third and fourth centuries had grown up in precisely those classes of the great cities of the Mediterranean that were most exposed to fluidity and uncertainty. For the lower classes of these cities continued to be recruited by the immigration of rootless peasants from the country. In the fourth century, just those groups whose attachment to the government service made them most mobile were, also, predominantly Christian. More important still, perhaps, was the inner exile imposed on leaders of the Christian Church, Augustine included, by the ascetic movement: the monastic life was ‘the life of a stranger’; the Christian community was described, not without justification, as a ‘race of strangers’.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, therefore, the sense of a fixed identity in a stable and well-oriented world, that would encourage the blaming of sorcerers and would single out incongruities in public behaviour as the misfortune par excellence, was being eroded in both the social milieu and the religious ideas associated with the leaders of Christian opinion. This situation changed as Late Roman society became more fixed…The idea of ill-defined guilt hardened into a sense of exposure to misfortune through the neglect of prescribed actions. At the end of the sixth century, it was plain to Gregory the Great that a woman who sleeps with her husband before a religious procession would risk demonic possession, just as the nun who ate a lettuce without first making the sign of the Cross on it would swallow a demon perched on its leaves.

In the earlier centuries, however, the Christian communities grew up through a belief in human ‘vested’ agents of good, endowed with inherent powers, as ‘beggars of the Holy Spirit’, to combat suprahuman agents of evil. The confirmation of Saint and Devil stole the scene from the sorcerer. ‘Our struggle’, wrote St. Paul, ‘is not with flesh and blood, but against… the World-Rulers of the darkness of this existence, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly regions.’ A belief which, as Origen remarked, ‘has led the rank and file of Christian believers to think that all human sins are due to the powers of the upper air: so that, to put it another way, if the Devil did not exist, no man would sin.’ From the New Testament onwards, the Christian mission was a mission of ‘driving out’ demons. Martyrdom, and later asceticism, was a ‘spiritual prize fight’ with the demons. The bishop’s office was ‘to tread down Satan under his feet.’ Full membership of the Christian Church, by baptism, was preceded by drastic exorcisms. Once inside the Christian Church, the Christian enjoyed, if in a form that was being constantly qualified, the millennial sensations of a modern African anti-sorcery cult. The Church was the community for whom Satan had been bound: his limitless powers had been bridled to permit the triumph of the Gospel; more immediately, the practising Christian gained immunity from sorcery.’…

But a newly established group committed to mutual love, its leaders acutely sensitive to the ‘worldly smoke’ of rivalry, could hardly survive the interplay of blame and envy that accompanied a belief in human agents of misfortune. What we find instead is a ‘humanizing’ of the superhuman agents of evil. In all Christian literature, the ambivalent and somewhat faceless daemones of pagan belief are invested with the precise, unambiguous negative attributes and motives that Libanius still saw in a professional rival who resorted to sorcery. The Devil was the ‘rival’ of the saint; envy, hatred, and the deadly spleen of a defeated expert mark his reactions to the human race.” (Brown:1972:134-7)

“In the fourth and fifth centuries, therefore, the rise of Christianity should be seen as the rise of a new grouping of Roman society and as an attempt to suspend certain forms of human relations within the fold of the ‘people of God’. If there are sorcerers, they are usually seen to work outside the Christian community (hence the pervasive identification of paganism and magic in Christian sources); if there is misfortune, it is divorced from a human reference and the blame is pinned firmly on the ‘spiritual powers of evil’. Hence, perhaps, the snowball effect of the rapid rise of Christianity. Men joined the new community to be delivered from the demons; and the new community, in turn resolved its tensions by projecting them in the form of an even greater demonic menace from outside.” (Brown:1972:138)

“This ‘learned’ sorcery, of course, will survive into the Middle Ages, both in the West, in clerical circles, and even more so in the Eastern Mediterranean, among societies that had remained in touch with their ancient roots- in Byzantium, Islam, and the Jewish communities. At the end of our period, however, it is joined by another theme. We meet the witch in the full sense, a person who either is born with or achieves an inherent character of evil. In this case, it is not an unconscious mystical quality: it is gained by a conscious act. But the power is gained by a binding compact with the ultimate pole of evil- the Devil; and, once this quality is gained, it is rare (outside pious stories) that the Christian authorities accept the recantation of the new-style witch. The contents of this new belief are well known. What matters is to seize the exact date and milieu in which it comes to the fore.

It is a Mediterranean phenomenon. We meet witches after the heart of the ethnographer in the law-codes of the Northern barbarians. But these witches are already glimpsed at a distance. They may not have long survived the process of rapid de-tribalization that coincided with Christianization, which marks the evolution of the barbarian ruling classes in Western Europe. The idea of the ‘servant of Satan’, I would suggest, is a direct sequel of certain developments in Western and Byzantine society at the end of the sixth century.

By the end of the sixth century, we are dealing with a society which regards itself as totally Christian. The last occasions when notable cases of sorcery can be associated with the worship of the pagan gods belong to the Eastern Empire in the 570s. From then on, there is only one possible outsider in a Christian world- the Jew. It is precisely at this time that we have the first widespread movements presenting the Jewish communities in Africa, Byzantium, Visigothic Spain, and, sporadically, Gaul, with the choice of baptism or exile.

Most important of all, perhaps, a man’s conscious identity was now deeply linked with his Christianity. In Christian popular opinion, the sorcerer could no longer be tolerated in the community on the condition that he recanted his art: for he was not considered to have abandoned his identity; he had denied his Christian baptism. Accusations of sorcery now take us into entirely Christian circles: bishops were implicated; and, in the new stories, the sorcerer is no longer the pagan outside the community- the man who delivers his soul to the Devil is a bishop manqué. The power of sorcery is gained, not by skill, but by a compact, a sealed document delivered over to the Devil, renouncing Christ, His Mother, and one’s baptism. Significantly, the Jew plays a part in these stories, not only because he is an outsider, but, more particularly, because he had always denied Christ- he was the ‘apostate’ par excellence.

We have come to a world where the overt bonds are far more rigid. This can be seen more clearly, even, in Heaven than on Earth. The correlation between Christian imagery and the social structure of the Later Empire is a fact almost too big to be seen: we meet it in every detail of the iconography of the Christian churches. By the sixth century the image of the divine world had become exceedingly stable. Angels were the courtiers and bureaucrats of a remote Heavenly Emperor, and the saints, the patroni, the ‘protectors’, whose efficacious interventions at court channelled the benefits of a just autocrat to individuals and localities. In the late sixth and early seventh century, sorcery is more often punished by the direct intervention of these divine governors: the sorcerer received short shrift, as a traitor from a well-regimented ecclesiastical society.

We have entered the tidy world of the Middle Ages. In Byzantium, an emperor conceived of as a ‘servant of Christ’, his person transparent to the image of Christ as King of Kings, will rule over a city where aristocracy and factions alike have been cowed. At the other end of the Mediterranean, the Visigothic kings of Toledo are showing strident proof of their high level of ‘civilization’ by swearing oaths at their coronation to rid their land of the ‘impiety of the Jews’. And, at the far pole of men’s minds, the Devil also has grown in majesty: he, also, is a great lord, a patronos, he also, can welcome his servants: ‘Welcome, from this time forth, my own loyal friend.’” (Brown:1972:140-42)

08: Byzantium – Bureaucracy trumps Sorcery – the Democracy of Pyramid Theology

“It strikes this reviewer that the Byzantine legacy to Greek Orthodoxy was a heavy one to bear.

For this legacy was ideally suited to maintain the identity of a group, but at a high cost of inflexibility and passivity. The author states, proudly, that ‘Byzantium was fundamentally a democracy’ and that the Holy Spirit could speak through a layman. But this was largely because, in Byzantium, the Holy Spirit had become so thoroughly predictable. The author makes an invidious comparison with Russia ‘where the populace was ignorant and usually inarticulate’. The problem is rather different. In Russia and in Western Europe, the laity was kept away from active participation not because they were uncultivated, but precisely because they had tended to participate too vigorously…The safely embedded ‘democracy’ of Byzantium never spilled over into an explosive proliferation of heresies and questionings….

Inflexibility, perhaps, is related to a split in Byzantine ethics. This split is the obverse of that apophatic tradition of mysticism which the author appreciates so highly, and understands so very well. Applied to dogma, the warm obscurity of a God of Whom little can be known is comforting and humane; but there is a harsher streak than this in the Byzantine tradition. For a God Who cannot be known may tend to become, for the average man, a God of unmodified dread; His mercy may appear merely as a spectacular suspension of the iron law of His retribution; and, among men, it is only by spectacular- and, so, infrequent- breaches in the iron law of a man’s hard relations to his fellows that this retribution is turned aside. To love one’s neighbour becomes a paradoxical gesture, inspired less by concern for one’s fellowmen, as by the need to make part-payment of a debt to an unmeasured God for an unfathomable sin. Faced by such harsh, looming demands, a man can seek reassurance only by adhering to those ways of his ancestors that had swaddled the Unknowable in accustomed gestures, in the warmth of shared sentiments, in long memories. Only an exceptional man like Nicholas Carbasilas could see in the traditional liturgy a transformer that passed the raw charge of the Unknown God into daily life: more often, one feels, it was placed like an ornate screen between the frailties of the average man and the angry eyes of his Pantokrator…

The traveller to Mistra cannot help feeling reassured as he passes from the flame-like, inviolable majesty of those aristocratic figures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a side-chapel, to find, a crude painting of Ottoman times, Christ portrayed- at last- as a beggar.” (Brown:1972:155-7)

The Flip Side of Sorcery: Habit – How do the Senate of the Republic become Christian and How do they effect Christianity, now that Constantine, their God in human form, is One – Pelagius?

“Perhaps the most significant feature of the end of paganism in Rome is that we do know about it…That this is so is due largely to the central position occupied in the religious history of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome…Ample justice has been done to their claim to represent, in the cultural, the political and the social, as well as in the religious, life of the Later Roman Empire, the pars melior generis humani. They can stand for the past; for the continuity of the Roman Senate and for the preservation of Roman classical culture…The archaeology of this period,  in Rome and Ostia, has revealed both their style of life and the tenacity and consistency of their devotion to those Roman and ‘oriental’ cults which are discussed in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. Quite apart from the religious situation of these men, we have come to appreciate that their gigantic wealth and unchallenged prestige had made it possible for them to influence decisively the political and social, as well as the religious, future of the Western Empire.” (Brown:1972:161-2)

“Yet Symmachus [father-in-law of Boethius] and his fellow-pagans lived in an age of rapid religious change, gleefully described by their Christian contemporaries as the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old Testament. In the next century, their descendants continued to represent the pars melior generis humani– but as Christians…what we still need to explain is their gradual transformation in the tempora Christiana….

But, to appreciate a change as profound, and far-reaching in its consequences, as the spread of Christianity in the most influential class of the Western Empire, due attention must be paid to such ‘internal’ factors; they ensured that the change in the official religion of Rome took the form, not of a brutal rejection of the past by an authoritarian regime, but of a transformation in which much of the Roman secular tradition was preserved.” (Brown:1972:163-4)

“In asserting their religion, the senators of Rome were led to flout the authority of their emperor; and, in failing, they revealed not so much the weakness of their religion, as of their political position…

The end of paganism is seen, in concrete terms, as a tragedy of distinct acts: it includes the removal of the Altar of Victory and the disendowment of the Roman cults by Gratian in 382, the abortive appeal of Symmachus in 384, the peripateia of the elevation of Eugenius in 392, and the tragic denouement of the defeat and suicide of Flavius at the battle of the Frigidus, in 394. The remaining evidence for acute tension between Christians and pagans has been grouped, almost instinctively, around these ‘turning-points’….

The principal difficulty of this interpretation is that it provides no sufficient explanation of the aftermath of the religious struggle between Senate and Emperor. After the debacle of the battle of the Frigidus, the prestige of the ‘Romans of Rome’ continued unaffected by the outcome of the civil war, throughout the fifth century. The most striking evidence of this is the letter of the Emperor Valentinian III to the Roman Senate, in 431; it is inscribed on the base of an honorary statue erected to Flavianus, of all people. Here the Emperor shows an ability to forget the tensions of the immediate past which would be incredible in any other age. The paganism of Flavianus, and his role in the usurpation of Eugenius, are passed over in silence; instead, the eclipse of so great a name is ascribed to ‘blind misrepresentation’. Valentinian, a pious Christian, is prepared to greet the sons of this pagan rebel, and the Senate, as politely as his grandfather Theodosius had always done; Flavianus, as a learned historian and dutiful servant was to receive a statue worthy of the ‘more wealthy commonwealth’ in which he had shone.

This paradoxical rehabilitation was by no means exceptional. In the events of the appeal for the Altar of Victory, in 384, the same pattern of respect for the ‘Romans of Rome’ appears. The opportunist court at that time, anxious to maintain an ‘Italian front’ against two zealous new men- Maximus in Gaul, and Theodosius in the East- had no hesitation in employing eminent pagans and keeping them in office for a long time after the resounding snub to their paganism engineered by S.Ambrose in his letters 17 and 18, to the boy-Emperor, Valentinian II. When Praetextatus died, only an extremist like Jerome could indulge in indecent glee (Jerome, Ep.23,2,I); the court behaved handsomely. The Senate’s petition for honorary statues was immediately granted. Symmachus was sufficiently moved by this public demonstration of respect. He rounded on the extremists of his own party, who had intended, in defiance of religious protocol, to allow the Vestal Virgins to erect a statue of their own to Praetextatus; in his view, the court, whatever their religious beliefs, had both done what was expected of them and all that needed to be done: ‘inlustrior enim laus est de caelesti profecta iudicio’ (Symm. Rel. 12,4).

These incidents show an interrelation between court and senatorial aristocracy which cannot be explained in terms of a sharp dichotomy terminated with the failure of Flavianus. The ‘Romans of Rome’ remained indispensable. Carefully managed under Stilicho, they were still able, in the political chaos caused by the arrival of Alaric and the usurpation of Attalus- in 408-9- to express their views and to adopt their own religious measures for the safety of their City. In the next century, the surface of their secular traditions remained intact. Aëtius could pose for them as the ‘Restorer of Liberty’; and even when there is no emperor left to woo them, the barbarian adventurers continue this tradition of respect. In the reigns of Odoacer and Theodoric, the senatorial mint resumed its activities, with a series of coins which showed Romulus and Remus, with the Wolf on the reverse and ‘Roma Invicta’ on the obverse…

Yet this façade of continuity only masks an important change. When Pope Gelasius turned his attention to the Lupercalia, he could condemn them as a superfluous relic. His opponent, Andromachus, was a Christian (§:7); the Pope’s answer had been provoked by a notoriously Christian criticism- an anti-clerical attack on the morals of one of his clergy (§2). In his argument he can appeal, conclusively, to the past; he points out that the ancestors of Andromachus had already decided to break with the traditions of Roman paganism (§28). It is, therefore, plain that  the Pope is writing in a city whose upper-class, had, at some time in the past, conformed to the tempora Christiana; although it is hardly surprising that, as the Senate of Rome Invicta, they should have conformed on their own terms.

This, broadly speaking, poses the problem which needs to be answered. At some time- or, more precisely, over a certain period- the secular traditions of the senatorial class, traditions which one might have assumed to be intimately bound up with the fate of their pagan beliefs, came to be continued by a Christian aristocracy. To understand this ‘sea change’, it is necessary to consider the ‘Romans of Rome’ in themselves, apart from the public crises which they had weathered so effectively; and to see whether the Christianisation of their class was not part of a long-term development, as elusive but, ultimately, as decisive as any change of taste.” (Brown:1972:165-9)

“There is one obvious feature in the histoire des moeurs of the fourth century as it affected religion; that is, mixed marriages. Christian opinion seems to have changed considerably on this issue; Augustine could say that a mixed marriage, regarded by S. Cyprian as a sin, was now no longer avoided as such…In his letter to Laeta, Jerome could paint an idyllic picture of the gradual evolution of this mixed family; the old pagan pontiff seemed doomed by the solidarity of his Christian kinsfolk…

In fact, such a picture- borne out in a more fragmentary manner for the other families- poses many problems. A mixed marriage might often be a mariage de convenance between unequal partners; thus, the Christian heiress, Poriecta, of the Esquiline casket in the British Museum, may have married, at the age of 16, an elderly pagan of over 60.” (Brown:1972:172)

“Despite Jerome’s optimism, mere intermarriage remained an inconclusive means of Christianization. To emphasize this aspect would mean ignoring the immense esprit de corps of a Roman gens, with its pagan roots. In the case of the Ceionii the most striking feature is not the factors contributing to the religious disintegration of the family- but mixed by marriages or asceticism; it is the solidarity of the male members in an ancestral paganism.” (Brown:1972:174)

“Many less fully-documented cases, before these years of crisis, however, show the strength of the movement towards a respectable, aristocratic Christianity. By far the most important of these is the conversion of the Anician family, and, especially, the late baptism of the doyen of Roman society, Petronius Probus, celebrated in a grandiose epitaph, and acclaimed by Christian writers as the ‘first’ conversion among the Roman aristocracy. Despite the courtesy of these Christian admirers, this spectacular ‘conversion’ had been long-prepared. There is no evidence that Probus had ever been a pagan; early in his official career, he was known as the patron of S. Ambrose; Proba, the grandmother of his wife, had already written a Vergilian canto on the ‘Creation and the Life of Christ’. Indeed, the baptism of Probus only marks the culmination of a long career dedicated to the aggrandisement of his family and to the founding of a tradition of self-interested loyalty to the powers-that-be; as the inscription implies, he had now exchanged the intimacy of the Emperor for that of Christ. …

This impression of an unexplored border-line between the pagan and Christian culture of Rome is increased by the rare examples of a frank syncretism: for instance, by the frescoes discovered in 1956, in a catacomb on the Via Latina, where scenes from the Bible and from pagan mythology are juxtaposed.

It is this drift into a respectable Christianity- a drift which may have begun as early as the reign of Constantius II- which explains how a Christianized Roman aristocracy was able to maintain, in Italy, up to the end of the sixth century, the secular traditions of the City of Rome. These traditions had survived effectively into the fifth century; they had not been seriously damaged either by the defeat of the pagan leaders who had rallied to the cult of Rome, nor by the flood-tide of the ascetic movement. That this was so is due, in part, to the slow transformation of whole families, such as the Anicii, the Valerii and, eventually, even of the Caeionii; a transformation which continued beneath the surface of the spectacular crises. It led to a blurring of the sharp division between a pagan past and a Christian present….

This survival of secular traditions was aided by the Imperial government, which, in the fifth century, insisted on accepting the ‘Romans of Rome’ on their own valuation- even to the extent of being buried in Rome, their ‘capital’, as their colleagues had been buried in Constantinople in the past century- and, paradoxically, by Pope Leo. From the very beginning of his pontificate, Leo ensured that the ‘Romans of Rome’ should have a say in the religious life of the City: acting together, the Senate and the Pope had cleansed the City of Manichaeans.

This gesture, in fact, is symptomatic of a significant change. At the end of the fourth century, it would be possible to write of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy with only a passing mention of the Roman church itself. Pammachius stands almost alone in having stayed at Rome, and dedicated himself to the normal religious life of the City. By the time of Leo, however, the Roman devotees of the age of Jerome, Augustine and Pelagius, had returned to the public life of Rome. Demetrias, for instance, had been advised, by Pelagius, in 413, to live a life of complete self-effacement, avoiding even charitable works; at the persuasion of Leo, however, she founded a church on her estate in the Via Latina dedicated to S. Stephen- a memory of her retirement in Africa, almost a generation before, when the newly found relics of the saint had first made their appearance. In the inscription, the advice of Pelagius is forgotten; she retains the illustrious name of her family. It is probable, also, that the family-church founded in his palace by Pammachius received, at last, it dues recognition.

The success of the work of integration begun immediately by Leo shows clearly the importance of this ‘sea-change’ in the religion of Rome for the later development of medieval Christendom. Both traditions- the Christian and the secular- contributed to the position of Rome in the early middle ages. Contemporary opinions on the career of Aëtius illustrate this fusion: to the Senate he could remain the ‘restorer of Liberty’; to Gallic writers he was campaigning under the aegis of S. Peter. It is not impossible that the sermons of Leo, carefully-prepared, monumental statements as they are of the claims of S. Peter and the privileged position of his Roman congregation, were regarded as a final reassurance of the direct descendants of the anxious pagan leaders of the fourth century. Symmachus had invoked the figure of Rome to defend the altar of Victory and had made it his constant concern to ensure that Roman religion should continue to be celebrated in Rome; his descendants could be made to feel that their own, considerably more precarious, world still depended upon a similar religious hegemony, admirably upheld by Leo in the name of Peter and Paul…

The picture which emerges, however, is significantly different from that of Ambrose and Prudentius, is significantly different from that of Ambrose and Prudentius, who attributed an overwhelming importance to the intervention of the Christian successors of Constantine. Due emphasis must, also, be placed on those commonplace links of culture and marriage which expressed the formidable solidarity of the ‘Romans of Rome’, in the face of the religious tensions of the age.” (Brown:1972:177-81)

“After 410, the Imperial court could no longer offer any provocation: its effective control of Italy had been weakened by the barbarian invasions, and its control of the religious life of Rome had been abandoned to the popes. This state of affairs is reflected in the religious evolution of the later Caeionii. After 410, the ancestral paganism of a Volusianus seems to lack not so much conviction as an issue on which to fight. It is hardly surprising, then, that men who came from families in which Christianity had been, for generations, acceptable to their wives and relatives, should have, at last, adopted this official religion of an Empire which had no power left to hurt, but which, with themselves, continued to guarantee that a minimum of Roman civilization would survive in a dangerous world.” (Brown:1972:182)

09: The End of Pelagius – The End of Early Christianity?

“The Pelagian controversy has long been the joy of historians of dogma: ‘There has never, perhaps, been another crisis of equal importance in Church history’, wrote Harnack, ‘in which the opponents have expressed the principles at issue so clearly and abstractly’….The Pelagian controversy has come to be interpreted as, in some way, throwing light on the social and political tensions of the declining Roman Empire.” (Brown:1972:183)

“Pelagius lived in Rome until 410. In Rome, he wrote his Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul; it was ‘to a Roman’ that he addressed his exhortations. His most considered manifesto- his letter to Demetrias- was written at the invitation of leading members of the Anicii, the doyens of the Christian aristocracy of Rome. His acquaintances included Paulinus of Nola, a man intimately connected with Roman Christian society; his patrons, a Roman priest, Sixtus- who later became pope.” (Brown:1972:185)

“This aristocracy was, as always, a heterogeneous and, in part a nondescript body of men. We should not be misled by the impression created by the letters of Symmachus or by the inscriptions that show the cursus honorum of leading senators. Many more senatorial residents of Rome have escaped our knowledge, simply by having escaped distinction. They passed their life in the manner of many an ineffective and affluent nobility; they ate too much; they read light literature; they gambled; they fell in love with actresses; the more enterprising risked their necks at adultery and the black arts.

Yet the most striking feature of the age is the success with which contemporaries disguised this fact from themselves and, so largely, from posterity. There is hardly a writer from this environment who does not give the impression of moving among an elite. Symmachus, the great pagan orator, is a notable example….

Symmachus’ position of strenuous conservatism is characteristic of a fluid and ill-defined society. The late fourth century saw a proliferation, even a confusion, of the ways in which a group could display its status. For, beside the pagan Senate of a Symmachus, there was the ‘Christian Senate’ of a Jerome: here was another acutely self-conscious elite: ‘Learn from me a holy arrogance: you are different from them.’…

‘Look at how the daughters of noblemen behave’, a Pelagian writer will exclaim; ‘look at how they carry themselves; look at their careful education… Inspired by their sense of high birth, they rise above the ordinary behaviour of mankind… by habitual discipline, they have created in themselves a nature different from the common run of men.’

Groups of men and women determined to live according to such distinctive standards of excellence were in constant need of mentors- from teachers of literature to father-confessors. They took these from the intelligentsia of the provinces. Pelagius, surrounded by his admirers in the Rome of the 390s and 400s would have been no more than the last figure in a long series, beginning, in the Late Roman period, with Plotinus, continuing through Marius Victorinus, Jerome, and the orator Magnus- a line of educators of senatorial families that included for a short time the biggest fish of all (the one, that is, that got away), the young rhetor, Augustine. …And there is no doubt that Pelagius’ writings, and those of his followers, are by far the most accomplished reflections, in Late Roman literature, of this widespread striving to create an aristocratic elite. Behind the counsels of perfection of Pelagius, we can sense the high demands of noblesse oblige and the iron discipline of a patrician household. The ideal Christian of Pelagian literature was a prudens, carefully reared in conformity to the divine law, to be different from ‘the ignorant crowd.’

Pelagianism in its hey-day, therefore, between 390 and 410, had appealed directly to a powerful centrifugal tendency in the aristocracy of Rome- a tendency to scatter, to form a pattern of little groups, each striving to be an elite, each anxious to rise above their neighbours and rivals- the average upper-class residents of Rome.

And it is precisely this tendency that will be formally condemned in Pelagianism in Rome. The followers of Pelagius and Caelestius are the only religious group in Rome that will be condemned not only for being heretical, not only for being disturbers of the peace, but, also, for claiming to be superior to everybody else: in the words of the Imperial Rescript of 30 April 418: ‘They consider that it is a sure sign of being low-born and commonplace, to think the same as everybody else; and a token of exceptional expertise- singularis prudentiae palmam– to undermine what is unanimously agreed.

To understand the exceptionally shrill note of this decree, we must bear in mind the dilemma of the Roman aristocracy in the previous twenty years, especially as it impinged on the Imperial court.

This aristocracy had been aimless and deeply divided. In the late 390s, feeling had run high, even among Christian families, over ascetic renunciations; that of the young couple, Pinianus and Melania, being the best known to us. Such incidents had already driven a wedge into the Senate. With the approach of the Gothic army, late in 408, the old division between pagans and Christians in the Senate had come out into the open: we can glimpse the rancours of those terrible years in the accusations of collaboration with the barbarians that, later, surrounded the Christian family of the Anicii, and in the smug account, in the Life of St. Melania, of the vengeance of God in the lynching of a pagan Prefect of the City during a food-riot.

The years after 410 are marked by a reaction. Rome- its population shrunk, its shops empty, its landscape marred by the burnt-out shells of great palaces- could no longer afford the luxury of harbouring conflicting groups. By 417, most of the old wounds had healed: the city itself had been repaired, its public services got back to normal; a studied optimism prevailed among pagan and Christian members of the governing-class…These years, indeed, saw a strong centripetal movement. The need for solidarity is shown, above all, in the final welding together of Christian and pagan in a homogeneous Christianized aristocracy. This homogeneity had been prepared, in the Christian Church in Rome, by an emphasis on Concordia, on ‘unanimity’, summed up in the carefully elaborated papal ideology of the Concordia Apostolorum, the agreement, on all matters, of Saints Peter and Paul…The newly achieved solidarity of the upper-class residents of Rome would not be allowed to be challenged…

Seen in this light, the condemnation of the Pelagians in 418 is the symptom of an irreversible change. For it coincided, significantly, with the official Christianization of the Roman Senate. From this time on, the Senate would collapse inwards, around the Roman Church. By the time of Pope Leo, for instance, it will appear as a united Christian body, led by its bishop against recognized outsiders- against the Manichees…

As for the great families who returned to their palaces in Rome, they would move with the times- towards uniformity.” (Brown:1972:186-91)

“There is only one definition of a Pelagian by Pelagius: he was a Christianus; his followers strove to be integri Christiani- ‘authentic Christians’. The behaviour of these integri Christiani was always thought of as being a reaction, an act of self-definition, the establishment of a discontinuity between the ‘authentic’ Christian and the rank-and-file of Christians in name only.

The problem of what was Christian behaviour, indeed, had reached a crisis in late fourth-century Rome. Too many leading families had lapsed into Christianity- by mixed marriages, by political conformity. Among such people, no discontinuity existed between the pagan past and the Christian present. The conventional good man of pagan Rome had imperceptibly become the conventional good Christian ‘believer’. Aristocratic habits of conspicuous waste, for instance, had merely continued unchanged as Christian almsgiving. Everybody agreed that it was ‘better to give than to receive’: it appears on an inscription, for instance, at Nola. But, as a Pelagian pointed out, like all biblical tags used to ease the conscience nobody quite knew where it came from: and nobody wanted to know that Christ had also said: ‘If you would be perfect: sell all you have and give to the poor.’…

Now one of the difficulties in interpreting the message of Pelagius is that is it only too easy to keep on the circumference of his thought and to miss its centre. What strikes the modern reader in the Pelagian writings are the extreme positions: we see Pelagianism, therefore, in terms of its radical emphasis on the independence of the individual, for instance, or on the equity of God’s law; or in its extreme views on the redistribution of wealth. What we forget, often, is that these extreme positions are only arcs on a circle; they point to a centre- a centre which, as if often the case, is usually taken for granted by Pelagius and his followers….

For Pelagius and the Pelagian the aim always remained not to produce only the perfect individual, but, above all, the perfect religious group…

Thus the most marked feature of the Pelagian movement is far from being its individualism: it is its insistence that the full code of Christian behaviour, the Christian Lex, should be imposed, in all its rigours, on every baptised member of the Catholic Church: ‘There is one law for all…’ Surely it is not true that the Law of Christian behaviour has not been given to everyone who is called a Christian?… There can be no double-standard in one and the same people.’ This insistence meant, in practice, that the standards of perfection, evolved in the past generation by the leading representatives of the ascetic movement, will be prescribed as the basis of the morality of the average Christian: the stream of perfectionism which, in a Jerome, a Paulinus, an Augustine, had flowed in a concentrated jet, will be widened, by Pelagius and his followers, into a flood, into whose icy Puritanism they would immerse the whole Christian community. The exposure of the whole community to ideals held to be binding, previously, only on the few is the hallmark of the Pelagian literature…

The ‘natural’ man, of course, existed for Pelagius: Abel and Job, for instance, had achieved holiness by merely following the dictates of the natural law, engraved on their conscience; the heroes of classical antiquity, also, had achieved some more piecemeal ‘sanctity’. But these naturally just men lived a long, long time ago, and Pelagius was very much a Late Roman man. The passing of time, for him, could only bring about decline.” (Brown:1972:192-95)

“In this emphasis on the nature of the constricting force of habit, we have a subtle parting of the ways between Pelagius and Augustine. Pelagius was undoubtedly influenced by the early anti-Manichaean works of Augustine; like Augustine, he used the force of habit, a force, that is, created by previous acts of the free will, as a way of rejecting determinism while facing the observed fact that men do find it difficult to control their actions. But, with Augustine, this force of habit became increasingly internal, deeply insidious. It established itself permanently in profound, unconscious layers of the personality: it worked, he thought, like the tendencies of the reformed drunkard towards alcoholism: it betrayed itself- as later it would betray itself for Freud- even by so innocent a phenomenon as a slip of the tongue.

For Pelagius, by contrast, habit remained essentially external to the personality; it was a rust, a rust that could be rubbed off. Hence, the great emphasis placed by Pelagius on baptism and on the experience of conversion. For in such an act, habit could be broken; the past of a man could be sloughed off; …His criticism of the doctrine of original sin, therefore, was determined by the fear that once a sin was regarded as ‘natural’ rather than ‘voluntary’, it would be allowed to survive the geological fault between a man’s past and his present that Pelagius associated with conversion and with the rite of baptism.

A man’s sinful behaviour, therefore, could be reversed: he was constricted by past habits that he could disown and, beyond himself, by the habits of a society which he could reform. Such ideas determined the attitude of the radical Pelagians to Roman society as a whole: plainly, Pelagian groups in Sicily regarded accumulated wealth as yet another bad habit, piled up from the evil actions of the pagan past that could be shrugged off by the Christian on baptism….he could firmly believe that no irreversible Fall of Man- only a thin wall of ‘corrupt manners’ – stood between the true Christian and the delightful innocence of man’s first state. It was an idea widespread among sophisticated people in the Later Empire…

From the time of Tertullian onwards, habit- consuetude- had always been thought of as an external, social force, and the Christian as being exposed, not only to his own ‘bad habits’, but to being suffocated and contaminated by the way of life of the pagan society around him.

Indeed, the need to break the hold of the past was one of the deepest currents in Western Christian attitudes to membership of the Church. It had meant that Christians had always tended to look at their own past from across the chasm of baptism. Cyprian’s Letter to Donatus is a typical document. He was a man who could still hardly believe that ‘such a volte-face’ could have taken place in himself; who was anxious to point out, to his friend, that sins that had seemed so deeply rooted in him as to appear part and parcel of human nature itself could vanish ‘in a single, drastic instant.’…

When Augustine wrote to Paulinus of Nola, in 417, to warn him that to tolerate the supporters of Pelagius would be to favour men who, like the pagan philosophers, held out the hope of achieving a ‘blessed life’- a beata vita- in this world, we can see how Augustine, himself once the author of a book de beata vita, ‘On the Blessed Life’, written under the influence of pagan neo-Platonic philosophers, had understood, from his own experience as a young convert in Milan (now thirty years past), the great hope of the Pelagian movement: ‘Behold all things have become new.’

For Augustine, all things had not become new. To the classic, even somewhat conventional, account of a dramatic conversion, in Books viii and ix of the Confessions, Augustine, the middle-aged bishop, would add the amazing Book x. When this Book x was read in Rome, Pelagius was ‘highly indignant’. He was right.  This one book of the Confessions marks the parting of the ways. Augustine, in a scrupulous examination of his abiding weaknesses, in his evocation of the life-long convalescence of the converted Christian, had tacitly denied that it was ever possible for a man to slough off his past: neither baptism nor the experience of conversion could break the monotonous continuity of a life that was ‘one long temptation’. In so doing, Augustine had abandoned a great tradition of Western Christianity. It is Pelagius who had seized the logical conclusions of this tradition: he is the last, the most radical, and the most paradoxical exponent of the ancient Christianity- the Christianity of discontinuity*….[* ‘Discontinuity’, the idea that conversion and initiation could make a total break in the personality, is most closely associated with Gnostic circles, where it is fundamental to their attitude to the world in general…But the attitude was widespread in the Early Church.]

For the Christian Church envisaged by the Pelagians was still the Church of a minority. It was a missionary group: it was recruited by the conversion of adults, for whom baptism was still a meaningful step; it could define itself over against a pagan majority by distinctive behaviour. This is the atmosphere of the Pelagian cells in Sicily. As we have seen, the baptized rich man would be expected to abandon his family property; but he would have joined a minority. He knew that the radical standards of its members would not be shared by the world at large” (Brown:1972:196-200)

“Only a decade later such provincial bishops would have to choose between Pelagius and Augustine. Eighteen bishops chose Pelagius. We can see why, in the brilliant journalism of Julian of Eclanum: to accept the ideas of Augustine, Julian argued, would be to encourage whole congregations, who had only recently nerved themselves to enter upon the drastic commitment of Christian, baptism, to settle back into the moral torpor of confirmed invalids. Julian accused Augustine of being a Manichee, of preaching fatalism- these were merely conventional bogeys. But what really hurt, before such an audience, was the remark that, as Augustine presented it, the great rite of baptism was no more than a superficial ‘shaving’ of sin: it left the Christian with roots and stubble that would only too soon grow again.

In Rome itself, in the 390s, all the material lay to hand for a radical interpretation of the rite of baptism… Later, the most eloquent verses on the meaning of baptism- that it involved the creation of an undivided, holy people- would be placed in the Lateran baptistery by none other that Pope Sixtus III, the man, that is, who, as a priest, had been regarded as a patron of Pelagius. Perhaps, it was just this ‘baptismal’ view of the Church that he had shared with the reformer. The heresy of Jovinian shows that a crisis in the associations surrounding baptism was imminent. Jovinian would argue that the sanctity conferred by baptism was sufficient to keep the Christian, thereafter, safe from sin; above all, that this rite fused the Christian community into a single group, in such a way as to make unnecessary the distinction between a ‘perfect’ ascetic life and a less perfect life of the married laity. Pelagian enthusiasts will merely stand Jovinian’s views on their head- by making the ascetic life obligatory for all baptized Christians, in a similar, drastic reductio ad unum.

After 410, Augustine will be faced, in Carthage, with congregations that included nuns, continentes, noble refugees who, in Rome, had been influenced by the teachings of Pelagius. He quickly summed up his audience… In these sermons he will point out, with considerable courtesy to his audience, that the baptism of an adult did not necessarily mean a new start to his life: that the convert should think of himself, not as a healed man, but like the man found wounded on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho- saved from certain death by the ointment of baptism, he must, nevertheless, be resigned to spending a lifetime of precarious convalescence in the Inn of the Catholic Church.” (Brown:1972:202-3)

A_The homodynamic idea of the soul is still prevalent in these early beliefs, and hence the Pelagian necessity of all Catholics behaving in a Catholic manner.

“I think it would be wrong to limit the appeal of the Augustinian idea of the Church as presented against the Pelagians. Some scholars have emphasized the sacramental powers, the hierarchical structure, the authoritarian ethos of the Catholic Church as presented by Augustine, and so have presented Pelagianism, by contrast, as an appeal to individual initiative, as a manifestation of ‘liberal temper’.

The Pelagians were Late Roman men, to a depressing extent….To be a reformer in the Later Roman Empire meant to be an authoritarian- and the Pelagians are no exception.

The weakness of the Pelagian position, over against that of Augustine, was rather that, as we have seen, the reformed Pelagian Church was assumed to be a minority: the ‘sacrifice of praise’ envisaged by the Pelagian, was to be the praise of pagan public opinion for the small, compact, and perfect group in its midst. In his dealings with the Donatists, Augustine’s thought had already taken him beyond this position. He assumed that Catholicism could be a majority religion….The development of his views on religious coercion merely meant that the Catholic Church had room, also, for forced adherents, bound to her only by the normal pressures of secular society…Pelagius, with his emphasis on man’s natural capacities, might seem to blur the boundary between the Christian believer inside the Church and the good pagan outside it: in fact, he only argued from pagan virtue to establish, a fortiori, an austere perfectionism as the sole law of the Christian community. His reformed church would have struck out, in the midst of Roman society, like an uneroded outcrop of ancient rock….Augustine would find room in the Catholic Church for the ordinary Christian layman of the Later Empire: a man, that is, with a few good works to his name, who slept with his wife faute de mieux– and often, just for the pleasure of it; a man prickly on points of honour, given to the vendetta; not a land-grabber, but capable of fighting to keep hold of his own property– though in the bishop’s court; and, for all that, a good Christian in Augustine’s senses, ‘looking on himself as a disgrace and giving the glory to God.’…

The significance of the defeat of Pelagianism, therefore, lies in the idea of the Church in Western society…many were convinced that they could reform the world in miniature- that they could, at least, create a sanctus populus within a religious group. The momentum of reform, therefore, already pointed away from the world at large and inwards to the core of the Church. But in Pelagianism this core was wider than it would be in any future period of the early Middle Ages Church: what concerned Pelagius was the populus Christianus in the widest sense- all baptized Christians, laity and clergy alike. Only a generation later the laity had sunk into the background..” (Brown:1972:204-07)

“It is not surprising that quaestiones on the origin of the soul should have been the forcing-ground of extreme assertions and denials of the idea of original sin. It is almost impossible to imagine a meeting of intellectuals in the Late Antique world where the subject of the fall of the soul would not be raised: Porphyry interrogated Plotinus on the issue for three days on end. The long letters which Augustine found himself forced to write to Roman Christians and to Jerome on the origin of the soul, show how the Pelagian controversy originated in an atmosphere already clouded by doubts on this issue. Above all, the practice of infant baptism had been invoked to support Origenist speculations on a pre-existent ‘taint’ in the soul…

Late Roman Christians were encouraged, by the whole climate of their philosophical culture, to keep something like an Origenist idea of the pre-existent ‘fall’ of the soul into a materially created body at the back of their minds,…Suddenly in the 390s, Origen’s solution became at once both topical and unacceptable: for Pelagius, the solution of the fall of the soul was ‘what certain heretics have dreamt up’. Men would have to decide how much of the baby of ‘election’ would have to go out with the bath-water of Origenism…

Pelagius, therefore, gravitated towards the circle around Rufinus,…In opting for Rufinus, one suspects, members of a newly Christianized aristocracy were opting against a farouche expatriate, in favour of a man whose work of translation gave them back their classical past in Christian guise- and introduced their Christian past in classical guise. Apronianus was a typical new convert: his Christian instruction was undertaken by Melania the Elder. He received impeccable Pythagorean maxims, under the name of the martyr- Pope Sixtus.” (Brown:1972:220-1)

“The Gothic invasion of 408 to 410 was a crushing blow to these hopes. Physical insecurity and the virulent re-awakening of confessional hatreds provoked another avalanche of ascetics to the East. Pelagius was among them. This was a fatal blow. The Pelagians who stayed behind might have found an opportunity for direct Christian action, to which their writers had urged them. Julian of Eclanum sold his estates to relieve the famine that followed in the wake of the Gothic army. He would have had his equivalents among the rich and popular Pelagian bishops of a beleaguered Britain. But, with the material basis of the Roman way of life crumbling around them, bishops did not need to be told by the Pelagians that they needed to impose a minimum of order and Christian decency. Aristocratic Roman society in the West, before 410, had contained an overlarge proportion of otiose rentiers, who needed to be reminded, by the Pelagians, of elementary social duties. The barbarian invasions marked the end of the indecent affluence of the absentee-landownership of the previous century. In the poorer, dislocated world of after 410, local ties and, often local responsibilities became stronger. In Rome, the growing influence of the Church in the life of the city ensured that Christianity did not only exist but was seen to exist- the aim of Pelagian exhortations: generous and opulent priests and vast new basilicas gave the Romans a sense of being a ‘holy people’ in a way far more concrete- and far less exacting- than the abstract demands of a Pelagius.

This last point deserves emphasis. The defeat of Pelagianism forced the Roman clergy to the fore. The great lay patrons of the late fourth and early fifth centuries cautiously stepped aside: the condemnation of Pelagius and the contestation of Julian of Eclanum were fought out among clergymen. Superficially obscured by a generation of déraciné eccentrics, the deeply rooted oligarchy of clerical Rome will come into its own after 418. It was the Roman church which had decided against Origenism; it was they who decided against Pelagianism. As pope, they would choose Boniface, a leading figure of the corps diplomatique of Pope Innocent. Boniface knew Jerome: with Jerome, he had been mentor to Eustochium. For Jerome was a priest. Behind the satirist’s dazzling artifice of alienation there lurked (thinly veiled but surprisingly little noticed by modern scholars) the cautious esprit de corps of the Latin clergyman. Paulinus, deacon of Milan, Jerome, Orosius, Augustine, and Boniface: in varying ways, every one of the men against whom Pelagius and Caelestius stumbled, were concerned with the interests of a group tied to the destinies of great churches. It is they who, by the way in which they condemned Pelagius and the reasons for which they expected others to condemn him, brought to a close the spring of a Christian lay culture in the Latin West.

As for Pelagius and the circle among which he had moved, very many found themselves in Palestine, quite as much refugees as pilgrims. They were disillusioned with the West: Sicily was unsafe, Africa unsympathetic. Their presence in the Holy Land is a symptom of the sudden, ominous widening of the gap between the standards of culture and stability prevailing in the Eastern and the Western part of the Mediterranean.

For the circles we have been describing have one thing in common. They had been formed by events that had happened in the eastern parts of the Empire. Though they had been content, even proud, to live in Italy, they still had dreams of ships sailing in from the East. After 410, the Eastern Empire and its theological issues sank further towards the horizon. By 418, Julian had realized that ‘the West’ had closed against him; Augustine would confirm his fears with gusto. Julian had to wage a ‘Punic War’ of the mind; he realized that the theatre of war would be confined to the Western Mediterranean. Seen in terms of the previous opinions and alliances of Roman aristocratic Christianity, Pelagianism appears, once again, as an incident in the relations between the Latin and the Greek worlds.” (Brown:1972:224-6)

“we can put our finger on a typical development in the aristocracy of the period that followed the Sack of Rome in 410: the surviving aristocracy of that ‘post-war’ generation tended to project backwards into the still prolific and turbulent age of Symmachus and Praetextatus, the social structure and intellectual life of their own days. This had become more rigid and more oligarchic. Despite the undeniable continuity of the senatorial tradition in Rome, we should not neglect this change towards a more restricted, more oligarchical social and cultural life among the ‘Romans of Rome’ of the fifth and early sixth centuries. Rome had become a city overshadowed by a double oligarchy of senators and clergymen….

The whole problem of the economic position of the Roman senatorial nobility in the fifth century needs re-examining. The importance of the landed wealth of the Senate, at that time, cannot be denied. Yet I doubt whether it is now possible to speak tout court of an outright economic ‘preponderance’ of the Senate over the Court. We should not forget the extreme fragility of the landed wealth even of the most wealthy families: such fortunes could be jeopardized by a succession of consuls- or of holy women! The enormous fortunes of the fourth century depended on conditions that no longer prevailed in the fifth. The senatorial revenue had come from properties scattered all over the Empire. They were at the mercy of communications and of the efficiency of the local estate-managers…

The barbarian invasions hit the ‘Romans of Rome’ quite as hard as they hit their Emperors. The political preponderance of the fifth-century Roman aristocracy, their evident determination to control the machinery of government, was not the consequence of an economic preponderance: it betrays, rather, the need to seek in political dominance, an insurance against the ever-present threat of financial ruin….

More important still, perhaps, than these confiscations, was the disappearance of the Imperial court itself. This destroyed the last dyke that had protected the ‘Romans of Rome’ against an upsurge of social fluidity….(The sixth century in the West saw an inarticulate, and so ill-documented, change in the style of life of the Roman provincials: more frequent opportunities for indulging in warfare came the way of a déclassé nobility, whose aggressive urges had, up till then, found outlet only in hunting).

Against the bustling, prosperous world of Northern Italy, that was loyal to the regimen Italiae of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the ‘Romans of Rome’ stood out in growing isolation. Political influence cost money. It meant a lot to a careerist like bishop Ennodius, that Boethius could, perhaps, no longer afford to give him an hotel de ville in Milan as part of the ‘goodwill presents’ of a consul to his supporters.” (Brown:1972:232-4)

10: Donatism – The Death of Rome, the Rise of The Walls of the Church into a Pyramid – Constantine Gets Control of Christianity

In the end, it was the western church that forced the pace of theological reflection on the nature and identity of the church. It seems to be a general rule of the development of Christian doctrine that development is occasioned by controversy. A stimulus seems to have been required to provoke sustained theological reflection. In the case of ecclesiology, that stimulus was provided by a controversy centring upon Roman North Africa, which has passed into history as “the Donatist controversy.”

Under the Roman emperor Diocletian (284-313) the Christian church was subject to various degrees of persecution. The origins of the persecution date from 303; it finally ended with the conversion of Constantine, and the issuing of the Edict of Milan in 313. Under an edict of February 303, Christian books were ordered to be burned and churches demolished. Those Christian leaders who handed over their books to be burned came to be known as traditores– “those who handed over [their books].” The modern word “traitor” derives from the same root. One such traditor was Felix of Aptunga, who later consecrated Caecilian as bishop of Carthage in 311.

Many local Christians were outraged that such a person should have been allowed to be involved in this consecration, and declared that they could not accept the authority of Caecilian as a result. The new bishop’s authority was compromised, it was argued, on account of the fact that the bishop who had consecrated him had lapsed under the pressure of persecution. The hierarchy of the Catholic church was thus tainted as a result of this development. The church ought to be pure, and should not be permitted to include such people.

By the time Augustine returned to Africa in 388, a breakaway faction had established itself as the leading Christian body in the region, with especially strong support from the local African population. Sociological issues clouded theological debate; the Donatists (so named after the breakaway African church leader Donatus) tended to draw their support from the indignenous population, whereas the Catholics drew their from Roman colonists.

The theological issues involved are of considerable importance, and relate directly to a serious tension within the theology of a leading figure of the African church in the third century- Cyprian of Carthage. In his Unity of the Catholic Church (251), Cyprian had defended two major related beliefs. First, schism is totally and absolutely unjustified. The unity of the church cannot be broken, on any pretext whatsoever. To step outside the bounds of the church is to forfeit any possibility of salvation. Second, it therefore follows that lapsed or schismatic bishops are deprived of all ability to administer the sacraments or act as a minister of the Christian church. By passing outside the sphere of the church, they have lost their spiritual gifts and authority. They should therefore not be permitted to ordain priests or bishops. Any whom they have ordained must be regarded as invalidly ordained; any whom they have baptized must be regarded as invalidly baptized.

But what happens if a bishop lapses under persecution, and subsequently repents? Cyprian’s theory is open to two quite different lines of interpretation.

By lapsing, the bishop has committed the sin of apostasy (literally, “falling away”). He has therefore placed himself outside the bounds of the church, and can no longer be regarded as administering the sacraments validly.

By his repentance, the bishop has been restored to grace, and is able to continue administering the sacraments validly.

The Donatists adopted the first such position, the Catholics (as their opponents came to be universally known) the second. …

Augustine responded to the Donatist challenge by putting forward a theory of the church which he believed was more firmly grounded in the New Testament than the Donatist teaching. In particular, Augustine emphasized the sinfulness of Christians. The church is not meant to be a “pure body”, a society of saints, but a “mixed body” (corpus permixtum) of saints and sinners.  …

A related biblical passage concerns John the Baptist’s prediction that Jesus of Nazareth will bring a judgement that can be compared to a threshing floor (Matthew 3:11-12). Both the wheat and chaff lie on the threshing floor, and are to be separated. So how is this to be interpreted? Two very different approaches emerged. For the Donatists, the threshing floor referred to the world at large, containing both wheat and chaff. The process of separation led to the emergence of the church as the community of the pure: the chaff remained in the world. For Augustine, the church itself was the threshing floor, in that its members included both wheat and chaff.

So in what sense can the church meaningfully be designated as “holy”? For Augustine, the holiness in question is not that of its members, but of Christ….In addition to offering this theological analysis of holiness, Augustine slyly noted that the Donatists failed to live up to their own high standards of morality. They were, he suggested, just as capable as their opponents of moral lapses.

Augustine made a similar point in connection with the theology of the sacraments. For the Donatists, sacraments- such as baptism and the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper- were only effective if they were administered by someone of unquestionable moral and doctrinal purity. This attitude can be seen in a letter written in 402 by Petilian, the Donatist bishop of Cirta, to Augustine, which sets out at some length the Donatist insistence that the validity of the sacraments is totally dependent upon the moral worthiness of those who administer them. …

Responding to this, Augustine argued that Donatism laid excessive emphasis upon the qualities of the human agent, and gave insufficient weight to the grace of Jesus Christ. It is, he argued, impossible for fallen human beings to make distinctions concerning who is pure and impure, worthy or unworthy. This view, which is totally consistent with his understanding of the church as a “mixed body” of saints and sinners, holds that the efficacy of a sacrament rests, not upon the merits of the individual administering it, but upon the merits of the one who instituted them in the first place- Jesus Christ. The validity of sacraments is thus independent of the merits of those who administer them. …

Donatus and his followers insisted that the efficacy of the church and its sacramental system was dependent upon the moral or cultic purity of its representatives. …Donatism threatened to make the salvation of humanity dependent upon holy human agents, rather than upon the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. …

We see here a major theme of Augustine of Hippo’s understanding of the Christian faith: that human nature is fallen, wounded, and frail, standing in the need of the healing and restoring grace of God. The church, according to Augustine, is rather to be compared to a hospital than to a club of healthy people.” (McGrath:2007:378-81)

A_Here we see the esoteric understanding of the bibles text, that we have seen explained throughout the history of world in cosmological manner, turned into the perspective of an institution that claims the sole power by which to achieve this separating of the wheat and the chaff, that in reality only God can do by His grace. It is Augustine that states that Sick doctors can run such an institution and spread their sickness into it.

Holy

How is the theoretical holiness of the church to be reconciled with the sinfulness of Christian believers? The most significant attempt to bring experience into line with theory can be seen in sectarian movements such as Donatism and Anabaptism. … This rigorist approach seemed to contradict substantial parts of the New Testament, which affirmed the fallibility and forgivability- if the neologism may be excused- of believers. Others have asserted that a distinction may be made between the holiness of the church and the sinfulness of its members. This raises the theoretical difficulty of whether a church can exist without members, and seems to suggest a disembodied church without any real connection with human beings.

A different approach draws upon an eschatological perspective. The church is at present as sinful as its members; nevertheless, it will finally be purified on the last day. “Whenever I have described the church as being without spot or wrinkle. I have not intended to imply that it was like this already, but that it should prepare itself to be like this, at the time when it too will appear in glory” (Augustine). “That the church will be […] without spot or wrinkle […] will only be true in our eternal home, not on the way there. We would deceive ourselves if we were to say that we have no sin, as 1 John 1:8 reminds us” (Thomas Aquinas).

Probably the most helpful approach to this mark of the church is to explore the meaning of the term “holy” in greater detail. In ordinary English, the term has acquired associations of “morality”, “sanctity”, or “purity”, which often seem to bear little relation to the behaviour of fallen human beings. The Hebrew term kadad which underlies the New Testament concept of “holiness”, has the sense of “being cut off”, or “being separated”. There are strong overtones of dedication: to be “holy” is to be set apart for and dedicated to the service of God.

A fundamental element- indeed, perhaps the fundamental element- of the Old Testament idea of holiness is that of “something or someone whom God has set apart.” The New Testament restricts the idea almost entirely to personal holiness. It refers the idea to individuals, declining to pick up the idea of “holy places” or “holy things”. People are “holy” in that they are dedicated to God, and distinguished from the world on account of their calling by God….

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) sets out an account of the issues concerning the holiness of the church, which emphasizes both the theological foundation and practical application of this belief:

‘Christ, holy, innocent, and undefiled, knew nothing of sin, but came only to expiate the sins of the people. The Church, however, clasping sinners to her bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification, follows constantly the path of penance and renewal. All members of the Church, including her ministers, must acknowledge that they are sinners. In everyone, the weeds of sin will still be mixed with the good wheat of the Gospel until the end of time. Hence the Church gathers sinners already caught up in Christ’s salvation but still on the way to holiness.’

The holiness of the church is here grounded in the person of Christ. Those who are drawn into the church through their quest for holiness began a journey of transformation, penance, and renewal. But this process is under way, and not complete.” (McGrath:2007:395-6)

“In North Africa, the decline of the Roman Empire has come to be connected with the rise of a dissenting form of Christianity. In 312, the Christian Church in Africa was divided on what seemed a technical point- the treatment of those who had lapsed in the last Great Persecution of Diocletian. Such divisions had occurred before, but, on this occasion, the schism became permanent, and remained permanent in some areas, until Christianity itself disappeared from Africa. The rise of such a vocal schismatic church, organized in a masterful fashion by Donatus, the schismatic bishop of Carthage, who gave his name to the movement, has ensured that the history of North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries should be treated as one of the most dramatic periods of ancient history. We have long known one of the actors in this drama: S. Augustine, as bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, devoted much of his time to the attempt to stamp out this schism…

The tragedy of this situation was felt, and forcibly expressed, by the Roman Emperors. Since the conversion of Constantine in 312 they had thought of themselves as the one authority which could ensure the unity of the Christian Church within their Christian Empire. It was a claim which few of them refrained from attempting to put into practice; and it was a claim which was ostentatiously rejected by both the Donatist Church in Africa and by the Coptic Church in Egypt. As the Emperor Honorius wrote to the bishops assembled at the conference of Carthage in 411: ‘The Donatists…discolour Africa, that is, the greatest portion of our kingdom and faithfully adhering to us in all its secular obligations, by a vain error and a superfluous dissension.’  It has been suggested, however, in recent studies of Roman Africa, that the phenomenon of Donatism cannot be explained in purely religious terms as a ‘superfluous dissension’; that a schism which began, ostensibly, as a quarrel between bishops on the application of a traditional penitential discipline to the see of Carthage, grew into a nucleus of social and political discontent.” (Brown:1972:238-9)

“Many years ago Sir Llewellyn Woodward, in his Christianity and Nationalism in the Later Roman Empire, had argued that the stubborn attachment of whole populations to heresy and schism could not be explained merely in religious terms. His acute sense of the mingling of religious and extra-religious factors in the mentality of the Late Roman Christians led him to suggest that heresies such as Monophysitism in Egypt were an expression of the prejudices of the Coptic-speaking Egyptian provincials against the orthodoxy of their Greek administrators. The Copts got a Christianity they had made themselves; they set up a church ruled from Alexandria and using a language different from that of the Greeks; and anathematized ‘the tyrant of Byzantium and the orthodox who are his slaves’. They were prepared to welcome the small Arab force of ‘Amr rather than sacrifice their ‘national’ Christianity to the Greeks.

In a certain sense, there is nothing new in this emphasis on extra-religious factors in the rise of the great heresies. …The first scholar to set out to form his own opinion on the factors underlying these sectarian alignments between ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’ deserves to be called the ‘Father of Later Roman History’: he is neither the Jansenist scholar, Tillemont, nor the philosophic historian, Gibbon- he is the German pietist, Gottfrid Arnold. His Impartial Historical Examination of Churches and Heretics, published in 1699, is, in many ways, a very modern book. His dislike of all established ecclesiastical bodies led him to ask of the fourth century questions which are still acutely relevant: above all, how it was that, in the centuries after Constantine, more Christians were persecuted under Christian Emperors as ‘heretics’ than had been persecuted as Christians by the pagans? He finds the answer in a striking fashion: ‘orthodoxy’ is not a dogma, it is an ecclesiastical vested interest- the Cleresei– whose power, prepared since post-Apostolic times, was fully recognised and increased, in return for empty flattery, by Constantine.

With such a perspective, a completely new ecclesiastical history is possible. What is at stake is no longer a doctrine (a finespun rationalization) but something more concrete and more readily apprehended by an historian- a system, the Cleresei, and the movements of protest which this system provoked, the so-called ‘heresies’. The high-road of ecclesiastical history is secularized:  the orthodox leaders appear no longer as the defenders of truth, but as the creators of a tyrannous system which outlives them; only the ‘heretics’ are pure….

Indeed, we have rescued half of the ecclesiastical history of the period- the origin and development of the great heretical churches- from the grotesque obscurity to which it had been condemned by the ecclesiastical Billingsgate of a none too fastidious age of controversy. We no longer seek to interpret the careers of the great heresiarchs- Donatus of Carthage and the Monophysite Patriarchs of Alexandria- in terms of personal ambition. For Africa, scholars have agreed to see in the Donatist Church of the ‘just who suffer persecution and do not persecute’, something more than the pungent caricature sketched with such art by Augustine; it can be accepted, and welcomed, as standing for some principle of protest against the short-comings of an Empire whose demands were arbitrary and whose vaunted order was maintained by a penal code of quite appalling brutality….

Today, however, we are able to see the cultural history of the end of the Roman Empire in terms of local revivals; we have learnt in this country to appreciate the most beautiful of these- the revival of Celtic art; and in the southern and eastern Meditarranean similar cultural revivals are being associated with the rise of local forms of Christianity. The Monophysite Church in Egypt adopted a native liturgy and produced a native literature; and in Africa the rise of the Donatist Church is held to have coincided with a revival of Berber art…

In the case of North Africa, the result of the acceptance of this interpretation has been that two views of the role of Christianity in the Later Roman Empire have come to coexist where previously there had been one. There is the view of Eusebius, Optatus of Milevis and Augustine. The Emperors have given their sanction to the universal mission of the Catholic Church; in the fourth century, both Church and Empire stand for values held to be universal throughout the Mediterranean; in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church is the continuator of this universal Roman civilization. To this view has been added a growing awareness of the strength and originality of another form of Christianity: the religion of Donatus, who had asked, ‘What has the Emperor to do with the Church?’ This religion is held to express the aspirations of a local Church church, representing the resistance of one group to an alien civilization; it formulated its resistance in rejecting as impure the universal Catholic Church and in maintaining all that was most intransigent in the Early Church- the cult of the martyrs, martyrs who could be made under both a pagan and a Christian Roman government…

It may perhaps be shown that Donatism- for all its local power- was part of a wider revolution, provoked by the rise of Christianity, in the Latin world; and that the history of this African schism is relevant not only to the rise of Islam in the south, but to the development of medieval Latin Catholicism in the north.” (Brown:1972:243-6)

“Pirenne taught us to look to the Mediterranean. As long as the unity of this inland sea was preserved, the wealth and culture of the ancient world survived; when this unity was broken, and when the Mediterranean ceased to belong to the Christian rulers of Europe, the Middle Ages had come. Thus, it was the rise of Islam as a hostile and exclusive power along the southern shores of this Christian Roman lake, which destroyed the unity of the ancient world. Mohammed had done what the northern barbarians had not wished to do; and Charlemagne; forced by the Islamic blockade of the South to turn to the land-locked, agrarian economy of the Frankish North, became, malgré lui, the ‘founder of the Middle Ages’.” (Brown:1972:240-1)

“Indeed, a view which sees in the survival of a great schismatic church to the expression of inevitable loyalties does not do sufficient justice to the role of leadership and to the commonplaces of ecclesiastical administration. What is particularly true of the ‘Empire’ of the patriarch of Alexandria is true also of the organization of the African Church. The most striking feature of this is the combination of an extraordinarily high number of bishops- at the Conference of 411 the Donatists had 284 bishops and the Catholics 286- with the unchallenged hegemony of a single leader– for instance, of the successive primates of Carthage, both Catholic and Donatist- Cyprian, Donatus ‘Prince of Tyre’, Primian and Aurelius. This is not surprising: as bishops of small townships and villages, the majority of the rank and file had no wish to quarrel with such leaders. Such massive acquiescence gives an impression of solidarity which could be interpreted as the expression of some more forceful loyalty. In fact, the local bishops had already got what they most appreciated; they were the masters of their small worlds and so virtually irremovable. Their position is a tribute to the cohesion of the African villages, but hardly to their animus against the religion of the towns. Both sides experienced the limited anarchism of these little men. The Catholic Council regretted that, once a priest had installed himself as the bishop of a village, there was no getting rid of him- ‘they lord it, like a usurper in his fortress’. And the cohesion of these small communities could cut either way. The Catholics found that Donatist villages were quite prepared to remain loyal to their new masters as long as they were provided with a bishop: this happened at Tucca, a small town in the Donatist diocese of Milevis, which hitherto had had to be content with a priest.

By pointing to such a mundane problem as the passivity of a country clergy- a phenomenon too easily mistaken for a deeply-motivated tenacity- we do not intend to replace one unduly simple model by another. It is sufficient to have drawn attention to some of the weak points of a view which sees in the rise and persistence of a schismatic church such as Donatism, the expression of deeper forces of disintegration.” (Brown:1972:252-3)

“But whether we interpret the origins of religious dissent in terms of other centrifugal tendencies or not, it remains, in itself, an ominous sign. It shows that a large proportion of the Christians subject to the rule of an emphatically orthodox emperor took very little notice of his frequent exhortations that there should be ‘One Catholic Veneration, One Salvation’. In Africa, and elsewhere, such dissent had remained normal and virtually unchallenged for generations. The Imperial administration, which continued to show its strength by disastrously over-taxing its subjects, seems to have done very little to reduce to order the many brands of Christianity established throughout its provinces…

Africa is the most notorious example of this failure of a Christian Empire, conscious of its unity and still able in other matters to impose its will. In this province the union of the two centripetal forces in fourth-century society- the Imperial authority and the Catholic Church- was effectively challenged. The drama of the situation is increased if we believe, with some scholars, that this alliance had been a calculated act of policy. The alliance had been made by Constantine and was tested immediately by the outbreak of the Donatist schism in 312. Were it not for the avidity with which the Catholic party collected a dossier of the official pronouncements of Constantine on the notorious ‘case of Caecilian’, we should know immeasureably less about his attitude to the Christian Church immediately after his mysterious conversion at the Milvian Bridge. It is important that we should know. The ‘Constantinian problem’ lies at the root of Later Roman history; and it is the great merit of Professor Brisson’s book that the problem of Constantine’s relations with the Christian Church has been placed in the forefront of his treatment of Donatism. The conversion of Constantine is, in his view, the centripetal reaction par excellence. The issue at stake is not the protest of a particularist group, but the autonomy of a provincial tradition of Christianity in a universal and parasitic Empire. It was Constantine who provoked this struggle by allying the Empire with the universal Catholic Church.

Gibbon had already sensed the importance of such an alliance: ‘The passive and unresisting obedience’, he remarked, ‘which bows under the yoke of authority, or even of oppression, must have appeared in the eyes of an absolute monarch the most conspicuous and useful of the evangelic virtues.’ But Gibbon had not been prepared to embark upon the difficult, and unpopular, task of deciding whether this Erastian vision of the passivity of the only unified religious body in his Empire was, in fact, the consideration which prompted Constantine in his conversion. Modern scholarship has forced many of us to make this decision. In England we have been protected by the works of Norman Baynes and A.H.M. Jones from doubts as to the somewhat inept sincerity of Constantine in his relations with the Christian Church. This is not so in M. Brisson’s France. The legendary nexus of Constantine’s conversion and, especially, the Life of Constantine by Eusebius, have been discredited as later falsifications. With them goes the picture of Constantine as a sincere Christian Emperor, swearing that he had been converted by a sign. We are left with what is very much the Constantine of the African Catholic dossier: a formidable patron of the Catholic religion, whose sincerity is unknown, but whose insistence, from the earliest years of his reign, on the peace and unanimity of both the Christian Church and his newly-conquered Empire, is so marked a feature of his public utterances that we are left to suspect that this craving for the unity of his own Empire under one god is the clue to his constant alliance with the one Church.

The conversion of Constantine has come to be regarded as a unilateral act of patronage by the Roman state to such an extent that it has even been suggested that the position of the Catholic bishops was equated to that of the more privileged officials of the Empire; and that their insignia, in the coming centuries, were a visible sign of the incorporation of the Church into the all-powerful bureaucratic machine.” (Brown:1972:254-6)

“The Christian tradition of martyrdom reached back to the Maccabees; its immediate background is provided by the vicious outburst of anti-semitism in Alexandria and elsewhere, beside whose victims, numbered in their thousands, the list of Christian martyrs pales into insignificance.” (Brown:1972:258)

“Augustine had to face the issue of religious coercion throughout his episcopate, and especially in his dealings with the Donatist schism. As far as I know, he is the only writer in the Early Church to discuss the subject at length. He even changed his mind on the issue, and he has told us of this ‘conversion’ with characteristic disarming frankness. It is a change which cannot fail to interest us, for whom the problem remains acutely relevant. He went on to justify religious coercion with a thoroughness and coherence which is quite as much part of his character as is his candour: and so Augustine has appeared to generations of religious liberals as ‘le prince et patriarche des persécuteurs. …

In the later Roman Empire, religious coercion, in some form, was one of the ‘facts of life’ for a provincial bishop. Even if contemporaries did not wish to deplore or justify what was going on around them, they had to take up some attitude towards it: and this attitude would, at least, allow them to impose shape and meaning on the events in which they were so deeply implicated. The ecclesiastical sources of the Latin Empire contain many fragments of just such attitudes to the problem of coercion.” (Brown:1972:260-1)

“The historian of the Later Roman church is in constant danger of taking the end of paganism for granted. Yet the fate of paganism filled the imagination of the Christian congregations; and the place of a bishop in Roman society, indeed, the whole sense of direction of his church, was intimately linked with the fortunes of his traditional enemies- the pagan gods.

The period between 399 and 401 marks one of the climaxes of the official suppression of paganism in Africa. In 399, a special mission had arrived in Carthage to close temples. Religious riots, leasing to at least sixty deaths, may have broken out in the same year. By 401, the Catholic Council of Carthage, in one of its busiest sessions, had sent a legation to appeal for yet more legislation against the ‘remnants of idolatry’. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Augustine may have first taken up a firm stand on the issue of coercion, not in the local politics of Hippo, but in his visits to Carthage in these exciting years.

Indeed, it if is possible to date Augustine’s sermons, especially his sermons 24 and 62, to the years 399 to 401, we can see in them nothing less than a dress-rehearsal of his justification of the coercion of the Donatists after 405. In one sermon of great charm, he had even defended the politic conformity of one leading pagan by referring to the forcible conversion of St. Paul- Paul, also, had been converted ex necessitate, by being knocked down and blinded on the road to Damascus. This scene of divine violence had begun to exercise Augustine: he would later use it extensively in his writings after 405, both ad hominem and applied to the Donatists in general. Thus, in Augustine’s first public work against the Donatists- the Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, which appeared in late 400- half of his attitude to coercion is already fully formed. The Christian Roman Emperors have an unquestioned right of cohercitio, in the strict legal sense, to punish, restrain and repress, those impious cults over which God’s providence had given them dominion. This is a deliberately provocative work, written ‘pour épater les bourgeois’. In it the storm-cloud of the Imperial severity may still be distant; but its outline, in principle, is quite distinct….

In his Trattato di storia romana, Professor Mazzarino has recently characterized the Later Roman period in terms of attitudes to authority current at the time: he had headed his chapter on the fourth and fifth centuries, ‘La prospettiva carismatica’, ‘The Charismatic viewpoint’. We might enter even deeper into the outlook of the Christian bishops if we substituted the title: ‘La prospettiva profetica’. ‘The Prophetic viewpoint’. What was happening around them happened secundum propheticiam veritatem. It was a prophetic truth that the Church should be diffused among all nations: this was Augustine’s main contention against the Donatists. But it was a prophetic truth on exactly the same level that the Kings of the Earth should serve Christ in fear and trembling; that the gods of the nations should be uprooted from the face of the earth, and that what had been sung, centuries before by King David, should now become manifest, as a public command, in the repression of pagans, Jews and heretics throughout the Roman Empire.” (Brown:1972:265-7)

A_St.Paul was of course converted by God, which does not mean that Augustine has to right to coerce conversion at all, unless of course he thinks that he is the conduit of God, which he does of course. He isn’t of course, because he would have converted people how God converted St Paul, or how his son Jesus did, and not by made up law and stick-wielding armies.

“But we have still to understand the final phase of Augustine’s attitude: that is, the way in which his conviction that the Emperors could punish impieties shifted to a belief that such punishment could be coercive in the full sense of the word– that external pressures could provoke changes of allegiance in whole congregations. We will gain nothing by setting aside Augustine’s frequent admissions that, at a crucial stage in the Catholic campaign against the Donatists, between 403 and 405, he had been unwilling to impose such full coercive measures against the Donatists.

This was genuine inhibition. It concentrated effectively on one point: the problem of the ficti– of the landslide of feigned conversions which such a measure would have provoked. Indeed, similar concerns remained as a constant braking-force on religious coercion throughout the Later Roman period. When the Christian church was still only one religious group among many in an ‘open’ society, responsible bishops felt that they could not absorb too great an influx of bad Christians. Augustine’s early letters and sermons on the rowdy celebrations of the Parentalia in Africa and of the Laetitia of S. Leontius in Hippo show how he regarded the low standards of his own congregation as having arisen, largely, from the ‘hypocrisy’ of pagans who had joined the church in masses after its official establishment by the Emperors.” (Brown:1972:268)

“Augustine’s reaction to the problem of the ficti reveals a distinctive feature of his attitude to coercion as a whole: his tendency to think in terms of processes rather than of isolated acts. Seen in this perspective, the individual act of free self-determination- the liberum arbitrium– is not denied: but it is mysteriously incorporated in an order which lies outside the range of such self-determination. This preoccupation had led Augustine to circumvent the previous tradition of thought available to Christians on the subject of coercion. It had appeared self-evident that freedom of choice- voluntas or liberum arbitrium– was the essence of religion; that adherence to a religion could be obtained only by such free choice; and that a religious institution which resorted to force must be a figmentum, a merely human ‘artifice’, since only an institution resting on human custom could resort to such all-too-human means of securing obedience. This tradition was articulate and respectable in the Latin World: it was shared in various ways by Christian apologists, Tertullian and Lactantius, and by Donatist writers, Petilian and Gaudentius.

But it would be a brave man who could challenge Augustine on the liberum arbitrium. He made his own position clear in an answer to Petilian. Petilian had said, ‘For the Lord Christ says, “No man can come to me except the Father draw him”. But why do you not permit each several person to follow his free will, since the Lord God Himself has given free will to men, showing to them, however, the way of righteousness, lest any one by chance perish from ignorance of it.’ And Augustine answered: ‘If I were to propose to you the question how God the Father draws men to the Son, when He has left them to themselves in freedom of action, you would perhaps find it difficult of solution. For how does he draw them to Him if He leaves them to themselves, so that each should choose as he pleases? And yet both these facts are true; but it is a truth which few have intellect enough to penetrate. So, therefore, it is possible that those warnings which you have been given by the correction of the laws do not take away free will.

An answer such as this cannot be divorced from the main body of Augustine’s thought. In this thought, the final, spontaneous act of the will could be preceded by a long process- of eruditio and admonitio– in which elements of fear, of constraint, of external inconvenience are never, at any time, excluded. This attitude is epitomized by two words which recur constantly in Augustine’s writings on coercion: disciplina and occasio. The meaning of both words are moulded by Biblical usage. Disciplina is always used to describe a process of divinely-ordained impingements, per molestias eruditio, such as had marked the relations of God with the people of Israel. Occasio derives from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Da sapienti occasionem et sapentior erit.’ Thus it is used to communicate the pressures of the Imperial laws as no more than one indirect impingement among many in the eruditio of the wise religious man.

The acceptance of external impingement as a factor in moral evolution is particularly associated with Augustine’s analysis of the force of habit, of the vis consuetudinis, an analysis which is one of his most profound and original contributions to ethical thought….Therefore, what is common to Augustine’s attitude to coercion and his thought in general is the acceptance of moral processes which admit an acute polarity- a polarity of external impingement and inner evolution, of fear and love, of constraint and freedom. …

Yet it is undeniable that, in order to make religious coercion merge unobtrusively into this wider background, Augustine has applied a certain amount of intellectual camouflage. A coercive policy, in imposing a series of direct physical restraints and penalties on the individual, would seem to lead to a sudden debasement of motives: purely physical fear would come to predominate stripped of the religious implications which usually surround Augustine’s concept of ‘fear and trembling’.

Therefore, it is difficult to enter fully into Augustine’s acceptance of this polarity if we do not consider some of the nuances of his attitude to the Old Testament. The concrete events of the Old Testament were very much alive to Augustine and his contemporaries, and the attitude which they adopted to the present was, in large part, moulded and defined by their attitude to this distant past. It is noticeable that many of the exempla which Augustine uses in his arguments with the Donatists- Elias, Nebuchadnezzar, Paul- are not cited merely as precedents for severity: they are deliberately chosen as symbols of the polarity we have just mentioned. They are, in fact, crucial examples of the deeper polarity of severity and mildness, of fear and love, which approximated to, without ever coinciding with, the division of the Old and New Testament. They were thought of as the ‘duae voces’ of the Scriptures of the one God….The issue is, also, taken up by the Donatists: they wished to ‘Separate the Times’, to claim that coercive measures were suited only to the severity of the Old Testament, and, so, were inapplicable in the tempora Christiana, a time marked by mansuetudo.

On this subject, Augustine had, yet again, by-passed the attitude of his opponents. He had been a Manichee, and had developed his early Catholicism in opposition to the Manichees, and had developed his early Catholicism in opposition to the Manichees. Thus, for ten years before the problem of the coercion of the Donatists had arisen, Augustine had been defending the polarity of the Scriptures against Manichaean criticisms…

It is tempting to risk a further speculation. In justifying the Old Testament to the Manichees, Augustine was well aware that he had to justify a coercive situation: the profoundly meaningful institutions of Israel has been imposed on the majority of Israelites frankly by fear; the Law was a paedagogus– it had acted, coercively, by threats. So, in dealing with the concrete institutions of Israel, Augustine could not avoid dealing with the wider problem of the utilitas timoris– the role of fear as a necessary element in enforcing a religious establishment.

Augustine’s justification of the Old Testament against the Manichees is one of his most ingenious excursions into the field of concrete historical reconstruction. The extent to which he had accepted as necessary this regime of fear is often effaced by his emphasis on the antithesis of Law and Grace in the anti-Pelagian writings…. He had ceased to think of the Old Testament as a distinct ‘stage’ in the moral development of the human race- valuable and inevitable in its own time, but a stage that had now been transcended. His alter perspective of history did not admit such an irreversible moral ascent. Because of this, perhaps, Augustine could see the utilitas timoris of the Old Law, not as a remote ‘period’, reflecting an alien ‘gradus morum’, so much as a continuous and necessary complement of the grace of the New dispensation. The Old Law, with its coercive qualities, was, of course, always doomed to remain complement of the grace of the New dispensation. The Old Law, with its coercive qualities, was of course, always doomed to remain incomplete, and it was certainly less predominant than in the time of Moses: but in an incomplete existence, its permanent utility could not be denied. And so, the concrete example of the people of Israel, with their enforced laws, could come very close indeed to the ecclesiastical realities of Augustine’s North Africa.

This nuance in Augustine’s attitude to the Law had coincided with a profound change in the imagination of his contemporaries. For the first time, the events of the Old Testament had become the true gesta maiorum of a large body of the Roman governing class. The Emperor Theodosius might claim to be descended from Trajan; but he was more aware of his resemblance to King David… It is in such subtle changes as these that we can trace the beginning of a Double Image of the Old Testament- at one and the same time the symbol of an outmoded dispensation and the ever-present precedent for an established religion, enforced by law. It is a Double Image which, from the time of Augustine to that of Spinoza, will be very near the root of every controversy on religious tolerance…

Even his usual term for ‘coercion’ is not cohercitio– root of our own word- which had retained its purely negative, legal meaning of ‘restraint’ and ‘punishment’: it is correptio– ‘rebuke’- defined by its aim, correctio, ‘setting right’. Correptio– Correctio: this is a doublet of deep meaning in Augustine’s ecclesiastical vocabulary: and it may be that the words are chosen, here, to ensure that his attitude to coercion should not be construed as purely punitive, but that it should appear as a positive process of corrective treatment…

One may hazard that Augustine’s choice of language was dictated, in part, by a need to allay the misgivings of such readers by assimilating the exercise of the Imperial authority as much as possible to the traditional authority of a Christian bishop. In any case, it is a choice of language of momentous importance in the evolution of ideas in a Christian society….

Augustine lived in a violent and authoritarian age. The death penalty and brutal tortures were imposed indiscriminately. At least it can be said of Augustine that, in this situation, he kept his head. In justifying religious coercion, he also thought about it: he had reflected on why he was prepared to go in putting into effect.” (Brown:1972:268-76)

11: The Law Versus The Word

“But remove the foundation of honesty for one moment from this attitude, and Augustine’s phrases become fallacious, horrible and insidious. In the excuses which the members of the congregation of Caesarius of Arles gave their bishop for having robbed the Jews, we can see a grim caricature of the subject we have just been discussing…

The historian must face this challenge honestly. He cannot merely circumvent it by defining, justifying or palliating a ‘doctrine’ which he reads of in the pages of Augustine.” (Brown:1972:277)

“Very briefly, the expansion of Christianity in Africa in the third century, and the permanent division of the Christian Church between Catholics and Donatists, after 311, coincided with the weakening of the hold of the Romanized classes of the towns on the under-Romanized countryside. Donatism allied itself with the resurgent culture of the country-districts of Numidia, and of the lower classes of the towns: Catholicism, with the Romanized upper-classes- the great landowners and the civic notables. As the support of the Emperors identified Catholicism with the interests of the central government in Africa, so opposition to the Catholic Church became the focus of social and political grievances. The notorious Circumcellions, the wandering monks of Donatism, were implicated in peasant’s revolts that shook the Roman agrarian system of Numidia in the 340’s, and threatened to do so throughout the century.” (Brown:1972:283)

“Now one of the distinctive features of Christianity in the ancient world as a whole, and in Africa in particular, is that it was a Religion of the Book. Like Judaism, the Christianity of the African clergy was a Law- a lex. The bishop’s authority stemmed from his preservation of his Law, and his professional activity consisted in expounding it. This Law, was, quite concretely, the codex of the Holy Scriptures. The fact that some Catholic bishops had handed on these codices to be burnt, during the Great Persecution of 304, branded their party, forever, as ‘the traditores’, the ‘handers-over’ of the Holy Books ‘to alter one word of which must be accounted the greatest sacrilege.’ ‘You come with edicts of Emperors’, the Donatist primate of Carthage told the Catholics: ‘we hold nothing in our hands but volumes of the Scriptures.’ The panache of this remark is deeply revealing. It was as a Religion of the Book that the Christians of Africa thought they had been persecuted; it was as a Religion of the Book that the Donatists thought they had been betrayed; and it was a Religion of the Book that Christianity spread into the countryside of Africa.

For, outside the educated upper-classes, the struggle between Christianity and paganism was not just a conflict of two religions: it was a conflict of two different cultures, associated with two different types of religion. Paganism, in the Roman world, like the religion of any primitive society, was inextricably embedded in the local language: the Lycaonians, in the Acts of the Apostles, acclaimed Paul and Barnabas as gods…The earlies vernaculars in the Roman Empire are pagan vernaculars, and the revival of one language, in the third century, that of Phrygian, was a pagan revival. Even the most imposing paganism in the Late Antique world, the Zoroastrianism of Sassanian Persia, remained largely preliterate. It was enshrined in murmured prayers, passed on by word of mouth. Only in the sixth and seventh centuries were the Zoroastrian holy books written down, to save the traditional faith from the inroads of two literate religions, Christianity and Islam.

To abandon paganism was to change one’s culture: it was to forget the formulae and liturgies of one’s ancient tongue, and to expose oneself to the uniformity of a written book.”…

Thus to participate fully in Late Roman Christianity, as a clergyman or a monk, inevitably involved suffering the fate which Irish legend ascribed to a convert of St. Patrick: ‘He baptised him and handed him the A.B.C…’

This Latin was more than a ‘popular’ Latin: it was a Latin that invited literacy- it had the simplicity and uniformity of an ideological language…This ‘clerical language, with its solemn dignity, cold-blooded anger and misuse of Biblical words to interpret and criticise contemporary affairs.’, remains common to both sides of the Donatist controversy.” (Brown:1972:288-90)

“Where the Bible ended, the popular song took over: Augustine wrote one such- the Psalmus abecedarius, ‘The A.B.C. against the Donatists’, ‘to reach the attention of the humblest masses and of the ignorant and obscure, and to fasten in their memories as much as we can.’

The African church never lacked controversy. The arrival of the Vandals in 429 meant the arrival of yet another group of ecclesiastical opponents- the Vandals being Arian heretics- who, again, were bilingual: speaking Gothic, their language of ecclesiastical culture was almost certainly Latin. Once again, the armoury of Latin controversy was trundled out: the testimonia, and the popular song- an ‘A.B.C. against the Arians’.

This is true of the third missionary group in Africa. Manichaean propaganda reached all classes: it was current in the villages of Numidia, as well as among the intelligentsia of Carthage; among humble artisans, as among great landowners. While in Egypt Manichaean literature passed, almost immediately, into Coptic, in Africa it remained exclusively Latin.” (Brown:1972:292-3)

“Christianity, indeed, had joined hands with that other agent of social mobility in Africa- the teaching profession…The process continued throughout the fourth century: looking through the personnel of the Donatist Church and reading the sermons of African preachers, one wonders whether, for the one bishop who might have entered the Church, in Gaul or Italy, as a spectacular avatar of the local senatorial magnate, there were not a score of minor clergy, in Africa, whose careers and outlook reincarnated the grammaticus and the small-town lawyer.” (Brown:1972:293-4)

“This, I would suggest, was the cultural function of the rise of Christianity in Late Roman Africa: far from fostering native tradition, it widened the franchise of the Latin language…The ‘traditional’ local aristocracy of curiales and grammatici tended to be either pagan or Donatist, while the ‘new’ aristocracy of honorati, as dependents on Imperial patronage, followed their masters into Catholicism.” (Brown:1972:294)

“Christianity won, in the West, as elsewhere in the Roman world, because it won the battle for the towns: it absorbed their culture, it transmitted this culture on its own terms, to those who had not enjoyed it on such easy terms in the social and cultural conditions of the Later Empire. (There may be a direct connection, in the Late Roman period, between the narrowing of Latin culture in its pagan form- its ‘aristocratisation’- and its widening- its ‘democratisation’- in its Christian form. For the Christianization Church had the best of both worlds: its urban structure and the recruitment of its bishops would constantly transmit the culture of an elite to large congregations, as Augustine, in Hippo, would spell out the sheltered mysticism of Plotinus in simple Latin).

There is always a social and cultural history yet to be written, of the terms on which Christianity won this victory in the Roman towns: it would aim, above all, to explain the gradual realization, throughout the fourth century, of that most breath-taking of all intellectual sleights of hand- the solemn identification, by Christian apologists from Origen and Lactantius onwards, of Christianity with true Greco-Roman culture, and the great tradition of Greco-Roman religion with all that was barbaric, un-Roman, not évolué….

One may doubt it: Christianity gained respectability at the high cost of adopting a town-dweller’s assumptions on the passivity of the countryside, and by committing itself, disastrously, to a town-dweller’s contempt of the barbarian. In Africa, it paid the heavy price of gradual extinction.” (Brown:1972:299)

A_So property rights, law, culture, art, all of the pyramid necessary magic of civilization- i.e. Rome- have become Christian values.

“It is both possible for some writers to blame the Church for being corrupted by accepting the unilateral patronage of this alien autocracy, and for others to treat religious coercion as a mere ‘backwash’ of ecclesiastical history, made inevitable by the unregenerate, authoritarian traditions of the Roman state. In fact, such a policy of coercion involved a ‘symbiosis’ between the Imperial and the Episcopal authority. This symbiosis is an equally important element in the history of this problem in the Later Empire: it has not received the attention it deserves. The purpose of this article is to suggest that, in North Africa in the age of S. Augustine, who was bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, the structure and ideals of both the Church and the Empire were being transformed in the course of a long period of such a symbiosis.” (Brown:1972:301-2)

“Around A.D. 400 the Catholic Church was distinguished from all other religions both by being privileged and by the fact that its rivals were repressed in varying degrees. ‘You must know, my friends’, Augustine said in a sermon, ‘how the mutterings (of the pagans) join with those of the heretics and the Jews. Heretics, Jews and pagans: they have formed a unity over against our Unity.’ This state of religious discrimination has been compared to the traditional differentiation which, in the Early Empire, had existed between Roman citizens and peregrini.

The laws on which this discrimination rested were, mostly, edited in the Theodosian Code of 438 and have been studied exhaustively. Very briefly, these laws punished individuals for certain unlawful religious acts, withdrew civic rights from the members of certain sects, excluded others from public enjoyment, and interfered with the property and collective worship of every non-Catholic religious body in the Empire, except the Jews. Certain rites such as those of ‘black’ magic had always been punished by death. This penalty was gradually extended to cover pagan sacrifices and, intermittently, was used against the leaders of the Manichees. In this last case, the laws only continued sanctions that had been laid down by pagan Emperors like Diocletian and Maximian who had persecuted the Christians. Other rites were subjected to increasing penalties: those who perpetrated heretical ordinations and ceremonies were fined, and the principle was later extended to impose proscription and exile on the Donatist clergy who had ‘polluted’ the Catholic sacraments by re-baptism. The property in which these rites took place was also forfeited: pagan temples were emptied and access to them restricted, idols and altars destroyed, heretical churches handed over to the Catholics, and illicit places of assembly confiscated.

It is possible to minimize the severity of these measures in comparison with later practice. Their point of departure was limited to externals: only specific acts were punished, and the means of performing them denied. Thus, in Africa, pagans would have found their temples closed for worship, would have been savagely punished for performing sacrifices, and excluded from the Imperial service: but at no time were they forced by law to join the Catholic Church. It was easy for Augustine to treat such laws as a purely external framework: they either prohibited ‘impieties’ or they brought indirect pressure to bear on individuals, as molestiae medicinales– as a ‘treatment by inconveniences’. We are still a long way from an official policy of forcible conversion, such as the forced baptism of the Jews in Byzantium and elsewhere in the seventh century.

In Africa, however, the special circumstances of the Donatist schism provoked a new departure. After 405, the laws against the Donatists are laws on ‘Unity’. They are framed to force the Donatist clergy and rank and file into the Catholic Church: they override the individual will and were known to provoke feigned conversions. Punishments, such as the loss of civic rights, were remitted on ‘penitence’, and in 412 and 414 a scale of very heavy fines was imposed on Donatist laymen who did not join the Catholic Church. This new principle comes very close to the use of direct force; indeed, slaves and coloni, who had always been exposed to such treatment, were to be ‘admonished’ by their lords ‘with frequent strokes’*. [*…Such uses of direct force were common on African estates. The Donatist bishop of Calama had rebaptized the slaves on an estate he had purchased- Augustine, Letter 66 (34,2, pp.235-6); and Augustine expected Catholic land-owners to exert what may have been similar pressure”]

It is tempting to try to reduce to order the confusing and often inconsistent punishments contained in the Theodosian Code. Many scholars see in these the continuation of a consistent juridical attitude, which underlay the persecution of the Christians under Diocletian- the belief that only those who adhered to the official Roman religion could expect to enjoy the full benefits of Roman citizenship…The language of the Theodosian Code provides only one certain conclusion: that from 379 onwards it led in the direction of religious intolerance…..

A policy of religious discrimination, pursued for many generations, cannot be summed up in a code of rules; it can best be understood by the historian as an ‘atmosphere’. Thus, this ‘atmosphere’ caused long-established Roman laws- such as those against magic- to case a considerably longer shadow under a Christian government.” (Brown:1972:303-7)

“The life of the rank and file would also have been affected by the confiscation of the estates of the Donatist church. The transfer of traditional property, which would have included the cemeteries, those foci of the intense family-feeling of the Africans, impressed contemporaries and is mentioned in Augustine’s later sermons. The economic effect of these measures may be exaggerated: with the possible exception of alms-giving, the transfer of this wealth would not so much have affected the poor as deprived the Donatist bishop of the means with which to ‘maintain his estate’ in the community. In the countryside, the coloni, serfs and Circumcellions were left to the discretion of the landlords, without direct intervention by the state. Thus, the working of religious coercion, as it affected the Donatists, served to emphasize that cleavage between the honestiores and the passive poorer classes- the humiliores– which is the most marked feature of the ‘pyramidal’ structure of Late Roman society.” (Brown:1972:311)

“The effects of the laws were very different at the top. The extension to them of civic disabilities usually applied only to the Manichees would have had a disastrous effect on the leading citizens of a civitas Romana such as Hippo. In an age in which the upper classes were especially dependent upon official privileges, titles and their ability to protect their wealth by litigation, a penalty such as infamia, which prejudiced just these advantages, was particularly onerous. The denial of the right to make donations, to receive legacies and even to make a will was aggravated by its repercussions on the family in a society where mixed marriages between Donatists and Catholics had once been common. We know of attempts to make false wills, and of high-ranking Donatists who may have been converted by such pressures….It was usually applied only to prevent donations to the Donatist church. In one such cause célébre, a nobleman challenged the will of his sister, who had left her property to a Donatist bishop: he had obviously intervened to keep the possessions ‘in the family’. There is even evidence to suggest that such laws were handled with anxiety by both Emperors and bishops: the Catholic Council was concerned lest the law provoked too many feigned conversions among those engaged in lawsuits…

Thus the immediate effects of the coercive legislation can best be seen at the top. The most obvious result was the effect on the Catholic hierarchy itself. The widening division between bishop and congregation is a phenomenon of Later Roman history that still needs to be explained. In a province such as Africa, as in the Greek East at the time of the Arian controversy, this split is directly connected with the problem of religious coercion. The Greek ecclesiastical historians of the time show how the heresy-laws were used as part of a game of forfeits by which bishops fought each other for the control of passive congregations. One example is plainly included by the historian as a caricature of this development. The orthodox bishop of Synnada was determined to persecute his heretical rival. Dissatisfied with the provincial governor, he went to Constantinople to appeal to the Praetorian Prefect for wider powers against the heretics. In his absence, the rival hit upon a brilliant idea: gathering his congregation, he subscribed to the orthodox creed, and took over the basilica of his persecutor. When the bishop returned from Constantinople, he found that he had been ‘trumped’! Other bishops might have found themselves placed by the Emperor at the head of alien and hostile communities. In such a situation, the identification of bishop and official would have become inevitable: nor would a bishop, once imposed by force, be likely to offer a firm resistance whenever the official policy changed.

Moreover the Catholic Church had always found it difficult to recruit clergy and the sudden accession of new sees forced the bishops to ‘scrape the barrel’. Antoninus of Fussala, Augustine’s disastrous nominee to a former Donatist community, is an extreme example of the possibilities of the new dispensation. Once ordained, he victimized his flock and then absented himself to Rome in order to regain his post. Augustine implied, in his letter to the pope, that it would be the last straw for this coerced community if a bishop were again to be imposed on them: ‘For threats are being made to the people… of legal processes and public officials and military pressure… In consequence, those unfortunate people, though Catholic Christians, are in dread of heavier punishment from a Catholic bishop than they feared from the laws of Catholic Emperors when they were heretics….

It was his duty of pasture his sheep ‘with discipline’. For Augustine, ‘discipline’ meant ‘teaching by inconveniences’: and the context of this and other sermons makes it clear that this disciplina had been extended from the purely moral sphere to include a large measure of identification with the ‘terror’ of the Imperial laws against heresy…

‘Heretical’ barbarian states were emerging as viable alternatives to the Roman Empire. These regna had limited ideological ambitions and little interest in the intolerance of their Roman subjects. The catholic bishops realized that such states were no substitute for the Empire as champions of the Church against religious dissent….An identity of interests, once stated so unambiguously, could hardly escape the notice of the possible victims of a renewed alliance of Church and Empire….

Again, it is possible to see the coercive legislation of the time of Augustine as an inevitable extension of the policy of Constantine, in that, once the Emperors had decided to grant privileges to the ‘Catholic religion’, they had to ensure that these privileges were not disputed, as they were in Africa, by the rise of a second church…. On two crucial occasions, in the issuing of the first laws of Unity against the Donatists, in 405, and in the condemnation of the Pelagians, in 418, Augustine was able to represent the tender feelings of the court as having played the decisive role: as a good Catholic, the Emperor could be expected to be shocked by heresy, and to be deeply touched by outrages committed against his ‘fellow-members in Christ’, the Catholic bishops. This emphasis on the subjective reaction of the Emperor and his servants as good ‘sons of the Church’ reveals a state of mind very different from that of Constantine, who had wished to impose unity in his new religion as an arbiter.*” (Brown:1972:312-7)

*This is an extension in an ecclesiastical sense of popular views of the omnipresence and all-embracing ‘sympathy’ of the Emperor; v. Gregory of Nazianz, Contra Julianum, i.80 (Patrol.Graeca, 35, 605) for the part of this view played in the veneration of the Imperial images, and the baroque language of a later panegyrist: Agapetos, Ekthesis (P.G.86. 1165 B), ‘the many-eyed mind of the Emperor keeps vigil as controller throughout all things’. Senators are also treated as ‘parts’ of the ‘body’ of the Emperor: Cod. Theod. Ix.xiv.3

“It is therefore, misleading to relegate the problem of religious coercion to a mere function of the political and social needs of the Roman Empire, and to say of the suppression of the Donatists, as P. Monceaux does, that: ‘Par sa campagne contre le Donatisme, l’evêque d’Hippone a peut-être sauvé partiellement, pour trios siécles, le Catholicisme et la civilisation de la contrée.’ Such a judgement is merely melodramatic: it should not blind us to an element of immediate and genuine tragedy- that, in a time of unparalleled religious ferment, the Emperors and the Catholic Church had combined to deny to the subjects of the Roman Empire an alternative to their own opinion in religious matters.

It would be unwise, however, to deny that the Imperial administration was forced, at times, to face the need for temporary religious tolerance. The official policy of excluding religious disasters ‘from the Roman soil’ was held in check by the need to avoid aggravating the provincials in times of crisis. In 409-10, during Alaric’s invasion of Italy, the authorities in Africa issued a hasty edict of toleration; the same happened after the battle of Adrianople (378) and, indeed, continued to happen whenever a state of emergency forced the Emperors to abandon, as a peacetime luxury, the unpopular policy of penalizing their subjects on religious matters…Again, a large measure of de facto tolerance continued to exist in the army by reason of its diverse recruitment…To treat this current of intolerance as having played a positive role in maintaining the unity and stability of the Roman Empire is contrary to much evidence.

For Africa, one factor seems to have played an important part in determining the Imperial laws against heretics: the Roman state was hypnotized by its own exercise of authority and at the same time this authority could no longer be taken for granted. This is an ‘imponderable’ factor, in that it both goes beyond and fuses the isolated religious and political motives that we have discussed; but it is a constant theme in the wording of the laws and can help us to understand the pertinacity of the Imperial legislation…

The Emperors could admit no discontinuity: hence the reiteration of laws in favour of the Catholic Church in the two periods of ‘direct’ rule which followed the suppression of the revolts of Firmus and Gildo. This reiteration, therefore, was probably not provoked by the fear of any deep-seated alliance between the Donatist church and the rebels: instead, it was part of a whole ‘ideology of reconquest’, which, since the third century, had marked the attempts of innumerable Emperors to assert their control of the whole Empire…In Africa, therefore, the problem of religious coercion was part of the general ‘crisis of authority’ that was so marked a feature of the last century of Roman rule in that province.

The question, then, is whether the Roman Emperors were able to assert their authority on their own terms, through their own officials, or whether they could only maintain the coercive legislation in such a way that the administration of the laws redounded to the credit, not of themselves as Roman Emperors, but of the only persons capable of securing their enforcement- the Catholic bishops. There is much evidence to suggest that the latter view is the correct one; and that, in Africa, the authoritarian action of the Roman state was ineffective without the zealous application- the instantia– of the Catholic Church…In the verbatim account of the Conference of 411 at Carthage, however, the situation has changed: the Emperor appears as a distant source of ‘terror’: but the ‘persecutor’ proper, spontaneously denounced by the spokesman of many small communities, is the Catholic bishop.” (Brown:1972:319-22)

“Thus, the attitude of the bishops and the Emperors overlapped without coinciding. This is made clear over one issue: the application of the death-penalty. Such a penalty was quite consistent with the maintenance of the authority of the state in religious matters. It continued to cover magic, and was extended to cover sacrilege- attacks on clergy and churches, which were frequent enough in Africa. This drastic penalty was hardly consistent with the expansion of the Church through the ‘correction’ of its enemies. The execution of Priscillian, the Spanish heretic, in Tréves in 385, on formal change of magic and obscene practices, had caused a vocal reaction largely because his death had made plain how easy it might be for unscrupulous bishops and authoritarian officials to make a permanent breach in the thin wall of principle. A similar problem existed in Africa: the Circumcellions were both a religious movement, whose members courted martyrdom, and potential criminals, liable to execution for assaulting the clergy- even to summary justice by the landowners as latrones.

The correspondence of Augustine after 405 contains many references to his use of the customary right of a bishop to intercede for the condemned, and of his personal influence with Imperial officials to make sure that the trials of Donatist terrorists were conducted with suitable publicity, above all, that the death-penalty should be avoided. He was determined that the coercive legislation should be applied in Africa only in a way that expressed the principles and aided the propaganda of the Catholic Church. Inevitably this determination led to disagreements with officials. In 414 Augustine was obliged to justify his general practice of intercession to Macedonius, the Vicar of Africa: Macedonius doubted whether a right to intercede was an integral part of the established religion; and he thought that there were too many wicked men in the world for criminals to receive such tender treatment.” (Brown:1972:324-5)

“The conflict of principle, however, was only part of a wider ambiguity: the Imperial laws in Africa were understood in the terms in which the bishops could claim to understand them in their sermons- they were ‘refracted’ in the distinctive ecclesiastical atmosphere of the province. One example shows this. The suppression of paganism involved considerable action by the state: in 399 a special mission had been sent to Africa to deal with the temples there. But this suppression was understood, in the popular imagination, as the fulfilment of the promises of God in the Old Testament, and the credit for it was transferred from the Emperor to the bishops. In the Greek and Latin literature of the age, the destruction of the magnificent material remains of paganism is told as the story of an heroic initiative of the bishops, remotely sanctioned by Imperial mandates. In the World Chronicle of Alexandria, the patriarch Theophilus is shown standing triumphant on the ruins of the Serapeum; and the suppression of the great temple of the Dea Caelestis in Carthage redounded, in popular legend, entirely to the credit of the Catholic primate, Aurelius.

These imponderable factors should not be ignored when we deal with the practical role of the bishop in applying the coercive legislation.” (Brown:1972:326)

“It is not easy to fit these fragments into a single pattern. Certain features, however, are undeniable. The rise of the bishop to predominance in the life of the Later Roman towns is a complex phenomenon, which varies from province to province and has yet to be fully understood. In Africa, however, it appears that this rise to power was closely connected with the role of the bishop in the application of the laws against heretics. It can be seen in Augustine’s lifetime.” (Brown:1972:329)

“It is an index of the speed with which certain aspects of the Christianization of the Empire took place.

This sudden rise can also be seen in terms of the power it replaced. The Emperor had become a distant figure…Already, in his debates with the Manichees, Augustine stands for the civitas against a stranger….

In Africa, therefore, the abstract problem of the relation of Church and State can be seen as a practical problem in the relation between the central policy of a Christian Emperor and the meaning which this policy took on in the local life of a bishop’s community. Often in history one group has risen to power by using and interpreting in its own sense the authority of a state too weak to impose its will in its own way. This is the last time in Roman history that energetic local men in that ‘Commonwealth of Cities’ will stamp their own meaning on the Pax Romana. The process did not pass unnoticed. In 404, Felix the Manichee stood before Augustine: he used the word ‘virtùs’ to describe the bishop’s position, in a way strangely reminiscent of the virtue of Macchiavelli- that mysterious quality of power that determines the rise and fall of states” (Brown:1972:330-31)

12: Early Christianity its historical activities resultant from Augustine’s Theology and Rome’s Autodynamic laws of the right to self-perfection

Christianity and the Roman state. Following Jesus’ precept “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, Christians did not challenge directly the Roman state: a Christian had to obey the emperor and his officials, respect the existing social order, including the position within it of Christian slaves, and trust in imperial justice (as did Paul, who as a Roman citizen appealed to the imperial tribunal). This compliance was not part of a Christian “strategy”, but of profound belief. It was believed that the kingdom of God was yet to come, and would be signalled by the return of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead. This expectation of the Second Coming was a passionate experience, and the event was regarded as imminent. Consequently, the temporal world took second place. According to Paul, the Christian city lay in the heavens….Again Suetonius (Nero 16) relates that, after the great fire of Rome in 64, “Christians were put to the torture, a kind of people addicted to a new and harmful superstition.” Tacitus, who devotes an extensive narrative to the fire of Rome, corroborates Suetonius’ bias, suggesting that the reason the Christians became easy scapegoats for the fire was because the public loathed them (Annals 15.44).” (Le Glay:2009:284)

The first element of the Church as it formed that I would like to look at is that of the changes from its early organisation to that of its institutionalised dogmatic hierarchy and its derivation from the Judaic priesthood who had themselves actually deserted this type of hierarchical institution for a more Pelagian led group of elders or Rabbi whose knowledge and lives mirroring this knowledge and spirituality spiritually guiding and mentored the Jewish community.

The Hierarchy of the Early Church – Its Conception and inception

“Recent emphasis on direct borrowings from Judaism has obscured the crucial importance of a dividing of the ways between the organization of the Jewish and the Christian communities. At just this period, Judaism was moving towards a greater ‘democratization’ and ‘de-specialization’ of the religious life. The rabbis, men who exemplified a religious culture which all believers might achieve, had come to replace the priest as the leaders of the community…The Judaism which a Christian bishop received into his community was not the Judaism of his contemporaries, the rabbis, but the ancient Judaism of his exemplars, the priests. Hence the importance of the ‘neo-Judaism’ of Christian adaptations of the priestly code of Leviticus: in a society greatly preoccupied, in the third and fourth centuries, with problems of organization, with hierarchy, with the divine sanctions of the Imperial power, the Christian Church stood out as a group that had organized itself most effectively on a hierarchy based on the division between the sacred and the profane, and, by implication, on the superiority of the spiritual over the lay world.” (Brown:1972:83-4)

A_So hierarchy was mistakenly taken as the way to proceed from the Jewish organisational theory that the Jews had themselves abandoned, now that they no longer had their own pyramid of territory held by arms by which to lay down the law through a hierarchy of power from divine authority.

The Old Testament

How did Israel understand its identity, and how were these maintained by its institutions? The noted American Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman (born 1933) argues that three distinct phases can be seen in Israel’s development of its sense of identity and purpose as a people, reflecting the different situations in which it found itself.

The first phase of its existence lasted until the founding of the monarchy under Saul (c.1250-1000 BC). During this period, Israel existed without a temple, priests, sages, or prophets. Its identity as a people was not defined by institutions, but by “a common commitment to Israel’s central story.”

The second phase pertained from 1000 to 587 BC. During this long period, which ends with the Babylonian captivity of the people of Jerusalem, Israel was governed by a monarchy. Brueggemann points to four features which ensured that Israel was able to maintain and consolidate its identity:

The temple and its priests provided legitimate and stable leadership over an extended period.

The kings provided essentially secular leadership of the nation, while at the same time being committed to the same religious ideas and values as the temple and its priests.

The book of Proverbs bears witness to a group of “sages”, corresponding to the western notion of an “intelligentsia” who provided intellectual legitimacy to the nation.

During this period, the prophets represented a means of divine guidance at points of particular difficulty or turbulence.

Brueggemann finds a third model arising after the return of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon. In this “postexilic” or “second temple” period, Israel was a much smaller nation, faced with serious problems in maintaining its identity in the face of occupation, initially by the Persians, and subsequently by the Greeks. Faced with the erosion of its distinctive identity in the face of these “universalizing cultures”, Israel sought to find its identity through links with the past. Brueggemann emphasizes the importance of texts during this era, as these provided a means by which the “threatened present generation” could connect up with “the horizon of reference points from the past.”” (McGrath:2007:375-6)

“Jew and Christians. The great innovation of the early Christian communities was to have excluded their proselytizing to the Jews of the diaspora, and then to the pagans. The internal conflicts that arose over the accommodations involved in this converting of the pagan world may be simplified as the conflict between the Judeo-Christian Peter and the apostle of the Gentiles, Paul. The victory of the Pauline tendency meant that the Christian communities gradually cut themselves off from the Jewish colonies of the diaspora, the largest of which was in Rome (30,000-50,000 members), while in Jerusalem they dissociated themselves from the Jews at the time of the great Jewish revolt (66-70 CE).” (Le Glay:2009:283-84)

Christianity takes the Offensive

Between Christians, Jews, and pagans, relations were complex, turning now to confrontation, now to appeasement, with the three religions always influencing one another. Everything depended on the balance of power. The “new faith” achieved swifter and greater success in the East. Persecuted under the Tetrarchy, the church found “peace” under Constantine, and then in its turn changed into an agent of persecution, chiefly under Gratian and Theodosius” (Le Glay:2009:535)

A_Who benefited from this balance of power- all of them did- see below. Mutually enriched

Christian practice

Christians followed these arguments with passionate interest. In social terms, the majority belonged to the poorer classes, tenioures and slaves who expected alms from their more fortunate brothers…Within the church, the rich formed only a minority, whether clerics like St Cyprian or laymen. They were those who could have the advantage of a “privileged burial”, for example  having their tomb placed under a mosaic inside a church.

All were united for a certain number of ceremonies that punctuated Christian life. Several sacraments existed at that time. Entry into the community could be marked by baptism, which was, however, commonly deferred until one’s death-bed, as in Constantine’s case, because it erased sins….

The organization of the church was hierarchical and, as usual in the Roman world, employed institutions modelled on those of the state. The clergy comprised numerous grades, first and foremost the hierarchy of bishops. The pope, the bishop of Rome, continued to extend his authority, although this was still largely moral, based on his prestige alone.” (Le Glay:2009:538-39)

A_who authored that authority of prestige- The pope himself.

Among the iconographic subjects, the best known, apart from the dove, is the fish, the Greek word for which, ichthus, comprises the initial letters of the words of the phrase (I)esous (CH)ristos, (Th)eou H(u)ios, (S)oter (“Jesus Christ, son of God, saviour”).” (Le Glay:2009:541)

Origen on the Church and Salvation

Origen (c185-c.254) here comments on the reference to the prostitute Rahab in Joshua 2, seeing in the promise that those inside her house would be saved from destruction a prophecy or “type” of the Christian church.

‘Let no one therefore be persuaded or deceived: outside this house, that is, outside the Church, no one is saved [extra hanc domum, id est ecclesiam, nemo salvatur].” (McGrath:2011:408-9)

Cyprian of Carthage on the Unity of the Church

In this discussion of the unity of the church, written in 251, Cyprian of Carthage (martyred 258) stresses the indivisibility of the catholic church, and its essential role in obtaining salvation. Salvation is not possible outside the church. It is not possible to have God as a father unless you also have the church as your mother.

‘The bride of Christ cannot be made an adulteress; she is undefiled and chaste. She has one home, and guards with virtuous chastity the sanctity of one chamber. She serves us for God, who enrols into his Kingdom the children to whom she gives birth. Anyone who is cut off from the Church and is joined to an adulteress is separated from the promises of the Church, and anyone who leaves the Church of Christ behind cannot benefit from the rewards of Christ. Such people are strangers, outcasts, and enemies. You cannot have God as father unless you have the Church as mother [Habere iam non potest Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matrem]. […]

Anyone who rends and divides the Church of Christ cannot possess the clothing of Christ [possidere non potest indumetum Christi qui scindit et dividit ecclesiam Christi].’” (McGrath:2011:409-10)

Petilian of Cirta on the Purity of Ministers

Pertilian, the Donatist Bishop of Cirta (born c.365), circulated a letter to his priests warning against the moral impurity and doctrinal errors of the catholic church. Augustine’s reply, dated 401, led Petilian to write against Augustine in more detail. In this letter, dating from 402, from which Augustine quotes extracts, Petilian sets out fully the Donatist insistence that the validity of the sacraments is totally dependent upon the moral worthiness of those who administer them. Petilian’s words are included within quotation marks in Augustine’s text.

‘ “What we look for is the conscience” [Petilian] says, “of the one who gives [the sacraments], giving in holiness, to cleanse the conscience of the one who receives. For anyone who knowingly receives faith from the faithless does not receive faith, but guilt.” And he will then go on to say: “so how do you test this? For everything consists of an origin” he says, “and a root; if it does not possess something as its head, it is nothing. Nor can anything truly receive a second birth, unless it is born again from good seed.”’

This passage sets out clearly the Donatist concerns over the catholic view that it is not the personal qualities of the minister, but the merits of Christ, which give spiritual efficacy to the sacraments. For Petilian, how can someone who is unworthy or corrupt be allowed to administer these sacraments? And how can anyone benefit from receiving such sacraments, when they have been tainted in the process of administration?” (McGrath:2011:411-12)

Leo the Great on Ministry Within the Church

Writing in the middle of the fifth century, Pope Leo I (usually known as “Leo the Great”, died 461) affirms that all Christian believers are sharers in the priestly office of Christ, anticipating aspects of the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

‘The sign of the cross makes all those who are born again in Christ kings, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit consecrates them all as priests. As a result, apart from the particular service of our ministry, all spiritual and rational Christians are recognized as members of this royal people and sharers in the priestly office [of Christ]. What is there that is as “royal” for a soul to govern in obedience to God as the body? And what is there that is as “priestly” as to dedicate a pure conscience to the Lord, and to offer the unstained offerings of devotion [immaculatas pietatis hostias] on the alter of the heart?’

This important passage sets out an understanding of the role of the laity within the church in terms of their sharing in its “royal” and “priestly” attributes. The biblical passage which lies behind this text is 1 Peter 2:9, which reads as follows: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” The text picks up on the idea of the church as “a royal priesthood”. This biblical passage also lies behind Martin Luther’s reflections on the “priesthood of all believers”” (McGrath:2011:41-34)

13: Women in Early Church – not Augustine again! – Oh Yer!

The Image of God

A text of central importance to a Christian understanding of human nature is Genesis 1:27, which speaks of humanity being made in God’s image and likeness- an idea which is often expressed with reference to the Latin phrase imago Dei. What does this affirmation mean? Both Jewish and Christian theologians wrestled with this passage, with quite different outcomes. The Jewish interpretation of humanity’s creation in the image of God tended to avoid any suggestion that this established a direct correlation with God, perhaps reflecting a fear of some form of anthropomorphism ensuing. Some Jewish exegetes argued that God created humanity in the image of the angels, interpreting the context of Genesis 1:27 to imply that God’s words were addressed to an angelic audience. Others argued that the text was to be interpreted as implying that humanity was created according to some humanity from the remainder of creation. Christian theologians, however, saw no difficulty in interpreting this passage as proposing a direct link between the creator and humanity, as the height of the creation.

Especially during the early patristic period, a distinction was drawn between the two phrases “image of God” and “likeness of God.” For Tertullian, humanity retained the image of God after sinning; it could only be restored to the likeness of God through the renewing activity of the Holy Spirit. …

A second approach found during the patristic period interpreted the “image of God” in terms of human reason. The “image of God” is understood to be the human rational faculty, which here mirrors the wisdom of God. Augustine of Hippo argued that this faculty distinguishes humanity from the animal kingdom: “We ought therefore to cultivate in ourselves the faculty through which we are superior to the beasts, and to reshape it in some way. […] So let us therefore use our intelligence […] to judge our behaviour.” …

The fact that humanity is created in the image of God is widely regarded as establishing the original uprightness and dignity of human nature. This idea was developed in a political direction by Lactantius during the early fourth century. In his Divine Institutions (c.304-11), Lactantius argued that being created in the image of God established the common identity and dignity of all human beings, leading directly to a series of political doctrines concerning human rights and responsibilities.

‘I have spoken about what is due to God; now I shall speak about what is due to other people, although what is due to other people, although what is due to people still equally relates to God, since humanity is the image of God. […] The strongest bond which unites us is humanity. Anyone who breaks it is a criminal and a parricide. Now it was from the one human being that God created us all, so that we are all of the same blood, with the result that the greatest crime is to hate humanity or do them harm. That is why we are forbidden to develop or to encourage hatred. So if we are the work of the same God, what else are we but brothers and sisters? The bond which unites our souls is therefore stronger than that which unites our bodies.’

[…]] Several patristic writers emphasized the state of blessedness enjoyed by Adam and Even in the garden of Eden. For example, Athansius taught that God created human beings in the “image of God,” thus endowing humanity with a capacity which was granted to no other creature- that of being able to relate to and partake in the life of God. This fellowship with the Logos is seen at its most perfect in Eden, when Adam enjoyed a perfect relation with God.

An important question must be raised at this point: do both man and woman bear this image of God? Most biblical interpreters of the early church took it as granted that both male and female were bearers of the divine image. However, Augustine of Hippo found himself challenged by some words of Paul in the New Testament, which pointed to the male as the primary bearer of the image, and the woman as a secondary or indirect bearer: “a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man” (1 Corinthians 11:7).

Augustine insisted that God “did not exclude woman from being understood as the image of God”, but found himself unable to allow that the woman bore this image in quite the same way as the man. The following passage from Augustine’s On the Trinity is often cited in this context:

‘The woman together with her husband is the image of God, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned as a help-mate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God; but as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.’” (McGrath:2007:348-50)

Let us hear from Dr. Bettany Hughes on this subject in her BBC One television programme ‘Divine Women’:

“In the early days of Christianity women played vital roles” Catholics today believe that they shouldn’t be priests by their Nature as ‘woman’. The person of Christ as a male saying, that, ‘this is my body’ therefore means men only can be priests.

“In 2010 the Vatican declared that to ordain a woman was a serious crime, now that seems to me to be very shocking, but also, as a historian it seems rather odd. Because, if you investigate the foundations of Christianity, they tell a very different story.”

Letter by St Paul to citizens of Rome “St.Paul in his letter to the Romans, chapter sixteen verse 1, says, ‘I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the Church’, and Paul by sending her to Rome, is saying ‘look at this extraordinary woman, and I’m sending you one of our best, and because I trust her, she is going to interpret this letter for you, so if you having any questions, ask Phoebe’…The entire letter to the Romans is about that there is a new equality about us, that we all share the same value and worth…Women were essential in the Early Church.”-Father Scott Brodeur teacher of theology at Gregorian University in Rome who prepares men for the priesthood. This is significant because Rome is of course one of the most important places to go and deacon is the most important job.

Basilica of Priscilla- catacombs in Rome- 2nd century AD-earliest art work of Christians when they were still being persecuted by Rome. Here we see women playing an integral role in the rites such as the Eucharist where Jesus is broken up in the manner of Osiris. In one picture the scene shows a woman wearing an Alb which is a vestment only worn by ordained priests. “All over this subterranean world there are images of not just men leading worship, but women.”

St.Augustine. Christianity began with promoting women, but many eminent leading theologians felt this was wrong because of their Nature.

Clement of Alexandria writes in 3rd century AD, ‘The very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.’ Another wrote, ‘women were not created in Gods image, they destroyed Gods image.’

“But there would be one man, whose glittering intellect and powers of persuasion would make this hotch-potch of women discriminating bile stick”, St Augustine.- Bettany Hughes.

Augustine in Milan 387 AD became a Christian. His ‘Confessions’ an autobiography reveal that he was a womanising man obsessed with sex, ‘hungry with desire’. ‘I polluted the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence and I dimmed its luster with the slime of lust’.

Celibate once Christian. He develops a theory “It was a theory so powerful, we’re still living with it’s consequences today. Augustine developed the concept of ‘Original Sin’. He believed that the crimes committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, when they ate the forbidden fruit would be perpetuated, down the generations, thanks to the act of sex. In other words, when any of us are born we are already creatures infused with sin, to the very core of our being. Women in particular come out of this very badly….It was Eve that encouraged Adam to sin. Eve becomes an archetype for all women, weak and easily fooled, but also a temptress who leads men astray. Rather than eroticism and sexual desire, being considered a gift of the gods, as they were in the classical world, now these things were thought of as unremittingly dark and sinful, a betrayal of God himself.”- Bettany Hughes

A_ The  Nature of women that began civilization as authority becomes the reason for their very lack of it. Desire as an Object for the Other, is their identity in this social-religious institution.

Late 4th century, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria fixed the canon of the Bible. This was the time of moulding Christianity to State religion of Rome. In 367 A.D. he sent a letter to all churches and monasteries of Egypt citing the 27 texts allowed today. Many texts were hidden from this powerful church.

Gospel of Thomas, ‘It is to those worthy of my secrets that I am telling my secrets, do not let your left hand understand what your right hand is doing’.

“Jesus said, ‘Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse.’”

“he loved Mary Magdalene more that the rest of the disciples, and used to kiss her often on the mouth.”- Nag Hammadi codices.

The Gospel of Mary describes a conversation between her and the disciples “She is the one who has the revelation, she is the one who is speaking. That gives her a prominence that we don’t find in other gospels.” Dr.Edward Adams- Department of Theology and Religious Studies- King’s College London

“It’s a fascinating document, in a way, because it shows that Jesus was having special knowledge that he was imparting to Mary, and therefore not only can you talk about the relationship that he had, but it also shows that women may have been seen in the earlier church, as repositories of spiritual knowledge. So you do get the beginnings of the idea that there is possibly a repression of womens voices, because these documents suggest that women were perceived to have a special role within the church, which have now disappeared.”

14: A brief look at the Muslim tradition in relation to Women

First the history:

“In Islam today, we find few female leaders of the faith, but at the beginning the story was very different. Two women in particular played a crucial role. Islamic sources tell us that Khadija-bin-curwailhid (A_don’t know how to spell this) was the daughter of a merchant who built the family business into a commercial empire…From all accounts Khadija was a powerful and independent minded woman. Once she was widowed, she vowed that she would never marry again…It was her business acumen that would set her on a path that would eventually change the history of the world.”

She hires a young man to help her with her business. She proposes marriage to him. She was 40 he was 25. Gradually he withdraws from marriage as he gets his revelations. He doubts them, but she believes and affirms them, she is the first convert to Islam. For next ten years she uses her wealth and power to support Mohammed. In 619AD she dies of fever- ‘the year of sorrow’. She takes Aisha as another wife, she is very young. When Mohammed dies a few months after taking Mecca it is Aisha who continues the faith, by her closeness to the Prophet. Many men come and learn from her the thousands of ‘sayings of the Prophet’- Hadith- that she alone has memorised. There is even a saying, ‘You can get half of your religion from Aisha’. Today Muslim women are often seen as oppressed, and are not allowed to speak in a mosque and have to sit at the back or separately from the men. -Professor Leila Ahmed

Now the true meaning of the Qur’an on women:

Qur. VII 189: “’tis He who created you from a single soul (Adam) and made from it its mate (Eve), that he might take comfort in her (li-yaskuna ilayhá).”

Cf. Mirsád, 52, 10 = 54,4: “When Adam looked on the beauty of Eve, he beheld the radiance of the Divine beauty (partav-i jamál-i Haqq).” Woman is the highest type of earthly beauty, but earthly beauty is nothing except in so far as it is a manifestation and reflexion of Divine Attributes (III 554 sqq., v 985 sqq). “That which is the object of love is not the form” (II 703): “’tis the draught of Divine beauty, mingled in the lovely earth, that thou art kissing with a hundred hearts day and night” (v 374). When Iblis desired God to give him a means of temptation that should be irresistible, he was shown the beauty of woman and was amazed by the revelation of Divine glory: “’twas as though God shone forth through a thin veil” (v 954 sqq). Cf. Tá’iyyah, 239= SIM, 222 sqq. The expressions used in the second hemistich are remarkable. Sweeping aside the veil of form, the poet beholds in woman the eternal Beauty which is the inspirer and object of all love, and regards her, in her essential nature, as the medium par excellence through which that uncreated Beauty reveals itself and exercises creative activity. From this point of view she is a focus for the Divine tajalli and may be identified with the life-giving power of its rays. WM has an interesting commentary (based on Fusús, 272: ….) which I will translate, because the details illustrate the difference between Ibnu’l-Arabi and Rumi as exponents of mystical ideas.

“You must know that God cannot be seen apart from matter (shuhúd-i Haqq subhánahu nujarrad az mawádd mumkin nist), and that He is seen more perfectly in the human materies (máddah) than in any other, and more perfectly in woman than in man. For He is seen either in the aspect of agens (fa’iliyyah) or in that of patiens (munfa’iliyyah) or as both simultaneously. Therefore when a man contemplating God in his own person (dhát) has regard to the fact that woman is produced from man (zuhúr-i zan az mard), he contemplates God in the aspect of agens; and when he pays no regard to the production of woman from himself, he contemplates God in the aspect of patiens, because as God’s creature he is absolutely patiens in relation to God; but when he contemplates God in woman he contemplates Him both as agens and patiens. God, manifested in the form of woman, is agens in virtue of exercising complete sway over the man’s soul (nafs) and causing the man to become submissive and devoted to Himself (as manifested in her); and He is also patiens because, inasmuch as He appears in the form of woman, He is under the man’s control and subject to his orders: hence to see God in woman is to see Him in both these aspects, and such vision is more perfect than seeing Him in all the forms in which He manifests Himself. This is what the Mathnawi means in the hemistich.

‘She is creative, you might say she is not created.’,

For both the attributes, agens, and patiens, belong to the Essence of the Creator, and both are manifested in woman: therefore she is creative and not created.”

WM asserts that the main part of this explanation is derived from the commentary on the Fusús by Dá’ud al-Qaysari and that Ibnu’l-Arabi himself is not responsible for it; but reference to Fusús, 272, 2 sqq., proves the contrary. He proceeds to argue that woman alone combines these two aspects of creation, whereas man had only one of them: he is fá’il (in the act of begetting), while she is both munfá’il (in conceiving) and fá’il (in the formation and development of the embryo). Fa and other commentators on this verse interpret khaliq as referring to the mediumship of woman in creation: she is the mazhar in which the Divine Names- Kháliq, Musawwi, and Muqaddir (cf. Qur. LXXX 19, LXXXII 7, etc.)- are displayed. The ascription of creative powers to human beings is justified by Qur. XXIII 14 (Alláhu ahsanu ‘l-kháliqin) and XXIX 16 (wa-takhuqúna ifkan). But the context here, together with other passages in the Mathnawi, leaves no doubt that what the poet has in view is not the physical functions of a woman but the spiritual and essentially Divine qualities in her which “create” love in man and cause him to seek union with the true Beloved. “Whether love be from this (earthly) side or from that (heavenly) side, in the end it leads us Yonder” (v. iii supra).

Bad-Faith – The Final Outcome of the Catholic Church in its Early Days – Oh Listen to Christ he is still saying, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. Oh and look at the amount of blood on his hands. Lovely!

“How important it is to take Account of Religion, and how Italy has been ruined for lack of it, thanks to the Roman Church.

…The rulers of a republic or of a kingdom, therefore, should uphold the basic principles of the religion which they practise in, and, if this be done, it will be easy for them to keep their commonwealth religious, and, in consequence, good and united. They should also foster and encourage everything likely to be of help to this end, even though they be convinced that it is quite fallacious. And the more should they do this the greater their prudence and the more they know of natural laws. It was owing to wise men having taken due note of this that belief in miracles arose and that miracles are held in high esteem even by religions that are false; for to whatever they owed their origin, sensible men made much of them, and their authority caused everybody to believe in them.

There were plenty of such miracles in Rome, among them one that happened when Roman soldiers were sacking the city of Veii. Some of them went into the temple of Juno and, addressing her image, said: ‘Do you want to come to Rome?’ To some it seemed that she nodded…Such beliefs and such credulity was studiously fostered and encouraged by Camillus and by the rest of the city’s rulers.

If such a religious spirit had been kept up by the rulers of the Christian commonwealth as was ordained for us by its founder, Christian states and republics would have been much more united and much more happy than they are. Nor if one would form a conjecture as to the causes of its decline can one do better than look at those peoples who live in the immediate neighbourhood of the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion, and see how there is less religion among them than elsewhere. Indeed, should anyone reflect on our religious, as it was when founded, and then see how different the present usage is, he would undoubtedly come to the conclusion that it is approaching either ruin or a scourge.

Many are of the opinion that the prosperity of Italian cities is due to the Church of Rome. I disagree, and against this view shall adduce such reasons as are necessary, two of them so potent that, in my opinion, it is impossible to gainsay them. The first is that owing to the bad example set by the Court of Rome, Italy has lost all devotion and all religion. Attendant upon this are innumerable inconveniences and innumerable disorders; for as, where there is religion, it may be taken for granted that all is going well, so, where religion is wanting, one may take for granted the opposite. The first debt which we, Italians, owe to the Church and to priests, therefore, is that we have become irreligious and perverse.” (Crick:1979:142-44)

“The popular literature of the Christian Church has ensured that the ‘man in the street’ exists for us, in the Later Empire, as is no other period of ancient history. And in the letter-books of the Fathers of the Church and in the acts and canons of its councils, Jones has found lush pasture for his evident fascination with the mechanisms of organization. As a result, this Survey is the first social history of the established Christian Church. Invaluable pages on the wealth and social origins of the clergy culminate in a remarkable conclusion: the Christian Church is caught in flagrante delicto, as an institution harbouring more idle mouths, taking a larger share of the national wealth than the notorious Imperial bureaucracy, and equally accomplished in extracting wealth from the peasantry.” (Brown:1972:50-51)

“As the legislative authority of the particular churches was insensibly superseded by the use of councils, the bishops obtained by their alliance a much larger share of executive and arbitrary power; and, as soon as they were connected by a sense of their common interest, they were enabled to attack, with united vigour, the original rights of their clergy and people. The prelates of the third century imperceptibly changed the language of exhortation into that of command, scattered the seeds of future usurpations, and supplied, by scripture, allegories and declamatory rhetoric, their deficiency of force and of reason. They exalted the unity and power of the church, as it was represented in the Episcopal office, of which every bishop enjoyed an equal and undivided portion. Princes and magistrates, it was often repeated, might boast an earthly claim to a transitory dominion; it was Episcopal authority alone which was derived from the Deity, and extended itself over this and over another world. The bishops were the vice-regents of Christ, the successors of the apostles, and the mystic substitutes of the high priest of the Mosaic law. Their exclusive privilege of conferring the sacerdotal character invaded the freedom both of clerical and of popular elections; and if, in the administration of the church, they still consulted the judgement of the presbyters or the inclination of the people, they most carefully inculcated the merit of such a voluntary condescension. The bishops acknowledged the supreme authority which resided in the assembly of their brethren; but, in the government of his peculiar diocese, each of them exacted from his flock the same implicit obedience as if that favourite metaphor had been literally just, and as if the shepherd had been of a more exalted nature than that of his sheep….

The same causes which at first had destroyed the equality of the presbyters introduced among the bishops a pre-eminence of rank, and from thence a superiority of jurisdiction. As often as in the spring and autumn they met in provincial synod, the difference of personal merit and reputation was very sensibly felt among the members of the assembly, and the multitude was governed by the wisdom and eloquence of the few. But the order of public proceedings required a more regular and less invidious distinction; the office of perpetual presidents in the councils of each province was conferred on the bishops of the principal city, and these aspiring prelates, who soon acquired the lofty titles of Metropolitans and Primates, secretly prepared themselves to usurp over their Episcopal brethren the same authority which the bishops had so lately assumed above the college of presbyters. Nor was it long before an emulation of pre-eminence and power prevailed among the metropolitans themselves, each of them affecting to display, in the most pompous terms, the temporal honours and advantages of the city over which he presided; the numbers of opulence of the Christians who were subject to their pastoral care; the saints and martyrs who had arisen among the metropolitans themselves, each of them affecting to display, in the most pompous terms, the temporal honours and advantages of the city over which he presided; the numbers and opulence of the Christians who were subject to their pastoral care; the saints and martyrs who had arisen among them; and the purity with which they preserved the tradition of the faith, as it had been transmitted through a series of orthodox bishops from the apostle or the apostolic disciple, to whom the foundation of their church was ascribed.” (Gibbon:1998:272-3)

“1. The community of goods, which had so agreeably amused the imagination of Plato, and which subsisted in some degree among the austere sect of the Essenians, was adopted for a short time in the primitive church. The fervour of the first proselytes prompted them to sell those worldly possessions which they despised, to lay the price of them at the feet of the apostles, and to content themselves with receiving an equal share out of the general distribution. The progress of the Christian religion relaxed, and gradually abolished, this generous institution, which, in hands less pure than those of the apostles, would too soon have been corrupted and abused by the returning selfishness of human nature; and the converts who embraced the new religion were permitted to retain the possession of their patrimony, to receive legacies and inheritances, and to increase their separate property by all the lawful means of trade and industry. Instead of an absolute sacrifice, a moderate proportion was accepted by the ministers of the Gospel; and in their weekly or monthly assemblies, every believer, according to the exigency of the occasion, and the measure of his wealth and piety, presented his voluntary offering for the use of the common fund. Nothing, however, inconsiderable, was refused; but it was diligently obligation; and that, since the Jews, under a less perfect discipline, had been commanded to pay a tenth part of all that they possessed, it would become the disciples of Christ to distinguish themselves by a superior degree of liberality, and to acquire some merit by resigning a superfluous treasure, which must so soon be annihilated with the world itself….

These oblations, for the most part, were made in money; nor was the society of Christians either desirous or capable of acquiring, to any considerable degree, the incumbrance of landed property. It had been provided by several laws, which were enacted with the same design as our statutes of mortmain, that no real estates should be given or bequeathed to any corporate body, without either a special privilege or a particular dispensation from the emperor or from the senate; who were seldom disposed to grant them in favour of a sect, at first the object of their contempt, and at last of their fears and jealousy. A transaction, however, is related under the reign of Alexander Severus, which discovers that the restraint was sometimes eluded or suspended, and that the Christians were permitted to claim and to possess lands within the limits of Rome itself. The progress of Christianity and the civil confusion of the empire contributed to relax the severity of the laws; and, before the close of the third century, many considerable estates were bestowed on the opulent churches of Rome, Milan, Carthage, Antioch, Alexandria, and the other great cities of Italy and the provinces.

The bishop was the natural steward of the church; the public stock was entrusted to his care, without account or control; the presbyters were confined to their spiritual functions, and the more dependent order of deacons was solely employed in the management and distribution of the ecclesiastical revenue. If we may give credit to the vehement declamations of Cyprian, there were too many among his African brethren who, in the execution of their charge, violated every precept, not only of evangelic perfection, but even of moral virtue. By some of these unfaithful stewards, the riches of the church were lavished in sensual pleasures, by others they were perverted to the purposes of private gain, of fraudulent purchases, and of rapacious usury. But, as long as the contributions of the Christian people were free and unconstrained, the abuse of their confidence could not be very frequent, and the general uses to which their liberality was applied reflected honour on the religious society. A decent portion was reserved for the maintenance of the bishop and his clergy; a sufficient sum was allotted for the expenses of the public worship, of which the feasts of love, the agapae, as they were called, constituted a very pleasing part. The whole remainder was the sacred patrimony of the poor. According to the discretion of the bishop, it was distributed to support widows and orphans, the lame, the sick, and the aged of the community; to comfort strangers and pilgrims, and to alleviate the misfortunes of prisoners and captives, more especially when their sufferings had been occasioned by their firm attachment to the cause of religion. A generous intercourse of charity united the most distant provinces, and the smaller congregations were cheerfully assisted by the alms of their more opulent brethren. Such an institution, which paid less regard to the merit than to the distress of the object, very materially conduced to the progress of Christianity. The Pagans, who were actuated by a sense of humanity, while they derided the doctrines, acknowledged the benevolence, of the new sect. The prospect of immediate relief and of future protection allured into its hospitable bosom many of those unhappy persons whom the neglect of the world would have abandoned to the miseries of want, of sickness, and of old age. There is some reason likewise to believe that great numbers of infants who, according to the inhuman practice of the times, had been exposed by their parents were frequently rescued from death, baptised, educated, and maintained by the piety of the Christians, and at the expense of the public treasure.” (Gibbon:1998:275-7)

15: The Christian temples of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, etc. displayed the ostentatious piety of a prince ambitious, in a declining age, to equal the perfect labours of antiquity

The form of these religious edifices was simple and oblong; though they might sometimes swell into the shape of a dome, and sometimes branch into the figure of a cross. The timbers were framed for the most part of cedars of Libanus; the roof was covered with tiles, perhaps of gilt brass; and the walls, the columns, the pavement, were encrusted with variegated marbles. The most precocious ornaments of gold and silver, of silk and gems, were profusely dedicated to the service of the altar; and this specious magnificence was supported on the solid and perpetual basis of landed property. In the space of two centuries, from the reign of Constantine to that of Justinian, the eighteen hundred churches of the empire were enriched by the frequent and unalienable gits of the prince and people. An annual income of six hundred pounds sterling may be reasonably assigned to the bishops, who were placed at an equal distance between riches and poverty, but the standard of their wealth insensible rose with the dignity and opulence of the cities which they governed. An authentic but imperfect rent-roll specifies some houses, shops, gardens, and farms, which belonged to the three Basilicae of Rome, St Peter, St Paul, and St John Lateran, in the provinces of Italy, Africa, and the East. They produce, besides a reserved rent of oil, linen, paper, aromatics, etc. a clear annual revenue of twenty-two thousand pieces of gold, or twelve thousand pounds sterling. In the age of Constantine and Justinian, the bishops no longer possessed, perhaps they no longer deserved, the unsuspecting confidence of their clergy and people. The ecclesiastical revenues of each diocese were divided into four parts; for the respective uses, of the bishop himself, of his inferior clergy, of the poor, and of the public worship; and the abuse of this sacred trust was strictly and repeatedly checked. The patrimony of the church was still subject to all the public impositions of the state. The clergy of Rome, Alexandria, Thessalonica, etc. might solicit and obtain some partial exemptions; but the premature attempt of the great council of Rimini, which aspired to universal freedom, was successfully resisted by the son of Constantine.” (Gibbon:1998:388-9)

“Such is the constitution of civil society that, whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honours, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance, and poverty. The Christian religion, which addressed itself to the whole human race, must consequently collect a far greater number of proselytes from the lower than from the superior ranks of life. This innocent and natural circumstance has been improved into a very odious imputation, which seems to be less strenuously denied by the apologists than it is urged by the adversaries of the faith; that the new sect of Christians was almost entirely composed of the dregs of the populace, of peasants and mechanics, of boys and women, of beggars and slaves; the last of whom might sometimes introduce the missionaries into the rich and noble families to which they belonged. These obscure teachers (such was the charge of malice and infidelity) are as mute in public as they are loquacious and dogmatical in private. Whilst they cautiously avoid the dangerous encounter of philosophers, they mingle with the rude and illiterate crowd, and insinuate themselves into those minds, whom their age, their sex, or their education has the best disposed to receive the impression of superstitious terrors.” (Gibbon:1998:286-7)

“And yet these exceptions are either too few in number, or too recent in time, entirely to remove the imputation of ignorance and obscurity which has been so arrogantly cast on the first proselytes of Christianity. Instead of employing in our defence the fictions of later ages, it will be more prudent to convert the occasion of scandal into a subject of edification. Our serious thoughts will suggest to us that the apostles themselves were chosen by providence among the fishermen of Galilee, and that, the lower we depress the temporal condition of the first Christians, the more reason we shall find to admire their merit and success. It is incumbent on us diligently to remember that the kingdom of heaven was promised to the poor in spirit, and that minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness; while, on the contrary, the fortunate are satisfied with the possession of this world; and the wise abuse in doubt and dispute their vain superiority of reason and knowledge.” (Gibbon:1998:288)

“The story of Paul of Samosata, who filled the metropolitan see of Antioch, while the East was in the hands of Odenathus and Zenobia, may serve to illustrate the condition and character of the times. The wealth of that prelate was a sufficient evidence of his guilt, since it was neither derived from the inheritance of his fathers nor acquired by the arts of honest industry. But Paul considered the service of the church as a very lucrative profession. His ecclesiastical jurisdiction was venal and rapacious; he exhorted frequent contributions from the most opulent of the faithful, and converted to his own use a considerable part of the public revenue.” (Gibbon:1998:334)

“Diocletian and his colleagues frequently conferred the most important offices on those persons who avowed their abhorrence for the worship of the gods, but who had displayed abilities proper for the service of the state. The bishops held an honourable rank in their respective provinces, and were treated with distinction and respect, not only by the people, but by the magistrates themselves. Almost in every city, the ancient churches were found insufficient to contain the increasing multitude of proselytes; and in their place more stately and capacious edifices were erected for the public worship of the faithful. The corruption of manners and principles, so forcibly lamented by Eusebius, may be considered, not only as a consequence, but as a proof, of the liberty which the Christians enjoyed and abused under the reign of Diocletian. Prosperity had relaxed the nerves of discipline. Fraud, envy, and malice prevailed in every congregation. The presbyters aspired to the Episcopal office, which every day became an object more worthy of their ambition. The bishops, who contended with each other for ecclesiastical pre-eminence, appeared by their conduct to claim a secular and tyrannical power in the church; and the lively faith which still distinguished the Christians from the Gentiles was shown much less in their lives that in their controversial writings.” (Gibbon:1998:337)

“The Latin clergy, who erected their tribunal on the ruins of the civil and common law, have modestly accepted as the gift of Constantine the independent jurisdiction which was the fruit of time, of accident, and of their own industry. But the liberality of the Christian emperors had actually endowed them with some legal prerogatives, which secured and dignified the sacerdotal character. 1. Under a despotic government, the bishops alone enjoyed and asserted the inestimable privilege of being tried only by their peers; and even in a capital accusation, a synod of their brethren were the sole judges of their guilt or innocence. Such a tribunal, unless it was inflamed by personal resentment or religious discord, might be favourable, or even partial, to the sacerdotal order; but Constantine was satisfied; and the Nicene council was edified by his public declaration that, if he surprised a bishop in the act of adultery, he should cast his Imperial mantle over the Episcopal sinner.” (Gibbon:1998:389)

“From Eusebius (in Vit.Constant., iv,27) and Sozomen (i,9) we are assured that the Episcopal jurisdiction was extended and confirmed by Constantine; but the forgery of  a famous edict, which was never fairly inserted in the Theodosian Code (see at the end, vi, 303), is demonstrated by Godefroy in the most satisfactory manner. It is strange that M. de Montesquieu, who was a lawyer as well as a philosopher, should allege this edict of Constantine (Esprit des Loix, xxix, 16) without intimating any suspicion.” (Gibbon:1998:404)

“Every popular government has experienced the effects of rude or artificial eloquence. The coldest nature is animated, the firmest reason is moved, by the rapid communication of the prevailing impulse; and each hearer is affected by his own passions, and by those of the surrounding multitude. The ruin of civil liberty had silenced the demagogues of Athens and the tribunes of Rome; the custom of preaching, which seems to constitute a considerable part of Christian devotion, had not been introduced into the temples of antiquity; and the ears of monarchs were never invaded by the harsh sound of popular eloquence, till the pulpits of the empire were filled with sacred orators who possessed some advantages unknown to their profane predecessors. The arguments and rhetoric of the tribune were instantly opposed, with equal arms, by skilful and resolute antagonists; and the cause of truth and reason might derive an accidental support from the conflict of hostile passions. The bishop, or some distinguished presbyter, to whom he cautiously delegated the powers of preaching, harangued, without the danger of interruption or reply, a submissive multitude, whose minds had been prepared and subdued by the awful ceremonies of religion. Such was the strict subordination of the Catholic church that the same concerted sounds might issue at once from an hundred pulpits of Italy or Egypt, if they were tuned by the master hand of the Roman or Alexandrian primate. The design of this institution was laudable, but the fruits were not always salutary. The preachers recommended the practice of the social duties; but they exalted the perfection of monastic virtue, which is painful to the individual and useless to mankind. Their charitable exhortations betrayed a secret wish that the clergy might be permitted to manage the wealth of the faithful for the benefit of the poor.” (Gibbon:1998:391)

“The grateful applause of the clergy has consecrated the memory of a prince who indulged their passions and promoted their interest. Constantine gave them security, wealth, honours, and revenge; and the support of the orthodox faith was considered as the most sacred and important duty of the civil magistrate. The edict of Milan, the great charter of toleration, had confirmed to each individual of the Roman world the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. But this inestimable privilege was soon violated: with the knowledge of truth, the emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the Catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity. Constantine easily believed that the Heretics, who presumed to dispute his opinions or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation. Not a moment was lost in excluding the ministers and teachers of the separated congregations from any share of the rewards and immunities which the emperor had so liberally bestowed on the orthodox clergy. But, as the sectaries might still exist under the cloud of royal disgrace, the conquest of the East was immediately followed by an edict which announced their total destruction. After a preamble filled with passion and reproach, Constantine absolutely prohibits the assemblies of the Heretics, and confiscates their public property to the use either of the revenue or of the Catholic church. The sects against whom the Imperial severity was directed appear to have been the adherents of Paul of Samosata; the Montanists of Phrygia, who maintained an enthusiastic succession of prophecy; the Novatians, who sternly rejected the temporal efficacy of repentance; the Marcionites and Valentinians, under whose leading banners the various Gnostics of Asia and Egypt had insensibly rallied; and perhaps the Manicheans, who had recently imported from Persia a more artful composition of Oriental and Christian theology. The design of extirpating the name, or at least of restraining the progress, of these odious Heretics was prosecuted with vigour and effect. Some of the penal regulations were copied from the edicts of Diocletian; and this method of conversion was applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of oppression and had pleaded for the rights of humanity.” (Gibbon:1998:406)

16: The sacraments of the church were administered to the reluctant victims, who denied the vocation, and abhorred the principles, of Macedoniu

The rites of baptism were conferred on women and children, who, for that purpose, had been torn from the arms of their friends and parents; the mouths of the communications were held open, by a wooden engine, while the consecrated bread was forced down their throat; the breasts of tender virgins were either burnt with red-hot eggshells or inhumanly compressed between sharp and heavy boards.” (Gibbon:1998:442)

“The simple narrative of the intestine divisions, which distracted the peace, and dishonoured the triumph, of the church, will confirm the remark of a pagan historian, and justify the complaint of a venerable bishop. The experience of Ammianus had convinced him that the enmity of the Christians towards each other surpassed the fury of savage beasts against man;  and Gregory Nazianzen most pathetically laments that the kingdom of heaven was converted, by discord, into the image of chaos, of a nocturnal tempest, and of hell itself. The fierce and partial writers of the times, ascribing all virtue to themselves, and imputing all guilt to their adversaries, have painted the battle of the angels and daemons. Our calmer reason will reject such pure and perfect monsters of vice or sanctity, and will impute an equal, or at least an indiscriminate, measure of good and evil to the hostile sectaries, who assumed and bestowed the appellations of orthodox and heretics. They had been educated in the same religion, and the same civil society. Their hopes and fears in the present, or in a future, life were balanced in the same proportion. On either side, the error might be innocent, the faith sincere, the practice meritorious or corrupt. Their passions were excited by similar objects; and they might alternately abuse the favour of the court, or of the people. The metaphysical opinions of the Athanasians and the Arians could not influence their moral character; and they were alike actuated by the intolerant spirit which has been extracted from the pure and simple maxims of the gospel.” (Gibbon:1998:444-5)

“Julian beheld with envy the wise and humane regulations of the church; and he very frankly confesses his intention to deprive the Christians of the applause, as well as advantage, which they had acquired by the exclusive practice of charity and beneficence.”…. “Yet he insinuates that the Christians under the pretence of charity, inveigled children from their religion and parents, conveyed them on shipboard, and devoted those victims to a life of poverty of servitude in a remote country. Had the charge been proved, it was his duty, not to complain, but to punish. [Note 39, attached to this passage]” (Gibbon:1998:476&497)

“The warmth of the climate disposed the natives to the most intemperate enjoyment of tranquillity and opulence; and the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians. Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured; the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule; and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capital of the East. The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passions, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured from the adjacent cities; a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements; and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch. The rustic manners of a prince who disdained such glory, and was insensible of such happiness, soon disgusted the delicacy of his subjects; and the effeminate Orientals could neither imitate nor admire the severe simplicity which Julian always maintained and sometimes affected. The days of festivity, consecrated by ancient custom to the honour of the gods, were the only occasions in which Julian relaxed his philosophic severity; and those festivals were the only days in which the Syrians of Antioch could reject the allurements of pleasure. The majority of the people supported the glory of the Christian name, which had been first invented by their ancestors; they contented themselves with disobeying the moral precepts, but they were scrupulously attached to the speculative doctrines, of their religion. The church of Antioch was distracted by heresy and schism; but the Arians and the Athanasians, the followers of Meletius and those of Paulinus, were actuated by the same pious hatred of their common adversary.

The strongest prejudice was entertained against the character of an apostate, the enemy and successor of a prince who had engaged the affections of a very numerous sect; and the removal of St Babylas excited an implacable opposition to the person of Julian. His subjects complained with superstitious indignation, that famine had pursued the emperor’s steps from Constantinople to Antioch; and the discontent of a hungry people was exasperated by the injudicious attempt to relieve their distress. The inclemency of the season had affected the harvests of Syria; and the price of bread, in the markets of Antioch, had naturally risen in proportion to the scarcity of corn. But the fair and reasonable proportion was soon violated by the rapacious arts of monopoly. In this unequal contest, in which the produce of the land is claimed by one party as his exclusive property, is used by another as a lucrative object of trade, and is required by a third for the daily and necessary support of life; all the profits of the intermediate agents are accumulated on the head of the defenceless consumers. The hardships of their situation were exaggerated and increased by their own impatience and anxiety; and the apprehension of a scarcity gradually produced the appearances of a famine. When the luxurious citizens of Antioch complained of the high price of poultry and fish, Julian publicly declared that a frugal city ought to be satisfied with a regular supply of wine, oil, and bread; but he acknowledged that it was the duty of a sovereign to provide for the subsistence of his people. With this salutary view, the emperor ventured on a very dangerous and doubtful step, of fixing, by legal authority, the value of corn. He enacted that, in a time of scarcity, it should be sold at a price which had seldom been known in the most plentiful years; and, that his own example might strengthen his laws, he sent into the market four hundred and twenty-two thousand modii, or measures, which were drawn by his order from the granaries of Hierapolis, of Chalcis, and even of Egypt. The consequences might have been foreseen, and were soon felt. The Imperial wheat was purchased by the rich merchants, the proprietors of the land, or of corn withheld from the city the accustomed supply; and the small quantities that appeared in the market were secretly sold at an advanced and illegal price. Julian still continued to applaud his own policy, treated the complaints of the people as a vain and ungrateful murmur, and convinced Antioch that he had inherited the obstinacy, though not the cruelty, of his brother Gallus. The remonstrances of the municipal senate served only to exasperate his inflexible mind. He was persuaded, perhaps with truth, that the senators of Antioch who possessed lands, or were concerned in trade, had themselves contributed to the calamities of their country; and he imputed the disrespectful boldness which they assumed to the sense, not of public duty, but of private interest. The whole body, consisting of two hundred of the most noble and wealthy citizens, were sent under a guard from the palace to the prison.” (Gibbon:1998:510-11)

A_Corn Laws again

“In the cruel reigns of Decius and Diocletian, Christianity had been proscribed, as a revolt from the ancient and hereditary religion of the empire; and the unjust suspicions which were entertained of a dark and dangerous faction were, in some measure, countenanced by the inseparable union and rapid conquests of the Catholic church. But the same excuses of fear and ignorance cannot be applied to the Christian emperors, who violated the precepts of humanity and of the gospel.” (Gibbon:1998:566)

“The sacred character of the bishops was supported by their temporal possessions; they obtained an honourable seat in the legislative assemblies of soldiers and freemen; and it was their interest, as well as their duty, to mollify, by peaceful counsels, the fierce spirit of the Barbarians. The perpetual correspondence of the Latin clergy, the frequent pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem, and the growing authority of the Popes, cemented the union of the Christian republic; and gradually produced the similar manners, and common jurisprudence, which have distinguished, from the rest of mankind, the independent, and even hostile, nations of modern Europe.” (Gibbon:1998:746)

“The Catholics, oppressed by royal and military force, were far superior to their adversaries in numbers and learning. With the same weapons which the Greek and Latin fathers had already provided for the Arian controversy, they repeatedly silenced, or vanquished, the fierce and illiterate successors of Ulphilas. The consciousness of their own superiority might have raised them above the arts and passions of religious warfare. Yet, instead of assuming such honourable pride, the orthodox theologians were tempted, by the assurance of impunity, to compose fictions, which must be stigmatised with the epithets of fraud and forgery. They ascribed their own polemical works to the most venerable names of Christian antiquity; the characters of Athanasius and Augustine were awkwardly personated by Vigilius and his disciples; and the famous creed which so clearly expounds the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation is deduced, with strong probability, from this African school. Even the scriptures themselves were profaned by their rash and sacrilegious hands. The memorable text which asserts the unity of the Three who bear witness in heaven is condemned by the universal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions, and authentic manuscripts. It was first alleged by the Catholic bishops whom Hunneric summoned to the conference of Carthage. An allegorical interpretation, in the form, perhaps, of a marginal note, invaded the text of the Latin Bibles, which were renewed and corrected in a dark period of ten centuries. After the invention of printing, the editors of the Greek Testament yielded to their own prejudices, or those of the times; and the pious fraud, which was embraced, with equal zeal at Rome and at Geneva, had been infinitely multiplied in every country and every language of modern Europe.” (Gibbon:1998:751-2)

We have clearly seen therefore, in this and the previous chapter that Augustine’s misunderstanding of the Nature of God and Christ, comes from the a priori matter from which God created the Universe, and how the idea of ex nihilo turns this theology on its head. However this concept of ex nihilo did not come in time to stop the Pelagian and Arian understanding of Christ to prevent their controversies and the Donatists who maintained the same non-institutional Peterian version of Christianity, which was flexible, gnostic, homodynamic and desired by its language to contain the pagan world, become an inflexible, closed, dogmatic, autodynamic, violent and corrupt world insidiously invaded by both the Roman world, i.e. its autodynamic laws and its rich senate and land-owners who use Christianity for self-interest through violence, fraud, pomp, fear and forced conversions in order to increase their ‘flock’ who they take great pride in then ‘fleecing’. All of which, under Augustinian theology is supposed to be obediently obeyed by the poor- the very people whom Christ came to praise and be with whilst condemning the rich, who are now the priests of the temple of Christ, land-owners and expansionists of mental and physical violence to any who do not bow to their hypocritically applied dogma and their morally incompatible Roman Laws.

In the next chapter- the Medieval- we will see how the incompatibility of these two concepts of morality and ethic world the Medieval world, which one wins the war and how it goes about it. This is the journey of the Medieval world into the capitalist world that we know today. To reach it we must travel for one thousand years through the Medieval.