Fields of Blood (31 page)

In this aggressive form of martyrdom, the martyrs were no longer the innocent victims of imperial violence: their battles now took the form of a symbolic—and sometimes suicidal—assault upon the enemies of the faith. Like some modern religious extremists, Christians felt that they had suffered a sudden loss of power and prestige—all the more acute in their case because the memory of their days as a despised minority were so recent.
⁶⁰
Christians courted martyrdom by smashing the pagan gods’ effigies, disrupting rituals and defacing the temples that symbolized their degradation, and loudly praising those who had defied Julian’s “tyranny.” When Julian was killed in a military expedition against
Persia and
Jovian, a Christian, was proclaimed emperor in his place, it seemed like a divine deliverance. But Julian’s reign, which had so rudely shattered the Christians’ newfound security and entitlement, had created a polarized religious climate and, at least among the lower classes, had exacerbated hostility between Christians and pagans. “Never again!” would be the Christian watchword as they contemplated renewed attacks on the pagan establishment in the coming years.
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State repression creates a history of grievance that often radicalizes a religious tradition and can even push an originally irenic vision into a campaign of violence.

Christian and pagan aristocrats, however, still shared a common culture that did much to mitigate this aggression among the upper classes. Throughout the empire, young noblemen and talented individuals of
humble birth were inducted in a “formation” (
paedeia
) dating from ancient times.
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It was not a purely academic program, though it was intellectually rigorous, but was primarily an initiation that shaped the behavior of the ruling class and profoundly molded their attitudes. As a result, wherever they traveled in the empire, they found that they could relate to their peers. Paedeia was an important antidote to the violence of late Roman society, where slaves were regularly beaten to death, where the flogging of social inferiors was perfectly acceptable, and where councilors were publicly thrashed for tax arrears. A truly cultivated Roman was unfailingly courteous and self-controlled, since anger, vituperative speech, and irascible gestures were unbecoming to a gentleman, who was expected to yield graciously to others and behave at all times with restraint, calm, and gravitas.

Because of paedeia, the old religion remained an integral part of late Roman culture, and its ethos was also absorbed into the life of the Church, where young men brought these attitudes with them to the baptismal font; some even saw paedeia as an indispensable preparation for Christianity.
⁶³
“With measured words, I learn to bridle rage,” the
Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) told his congregation.
⁶⁴
His friends
Basil, bishop of
Caesarea (c. 330–79), and
Gregory, bishop of Nyssa (331–95), Basil’s younger brother, were not baptized until after they had completed this traditional training.
⁶⁵
The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the
Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers, developed toward the end of the
Arian crisis. They had been uneasy about these disputes, strident on both sides, each of which had cultivated a hardened certainty about these ineffable matters. The Cappadocians practiced the silent, reticent prayer designed by Evagrius of Pontus, in part to strip the mind of such angry dogmatism. They knew that it was impossible to speak about God as we speak about ordinary matters, and the Trinity was designed first to help Christians realize that what we call God lay beyond the reach of words and concepts. They would also introduce Christians to a meditation on the Trinity that would help them to develop attitudes of restraint in their own lives, enabling them to counter aggressive and bellicose intolerance.

Many Christians had been confused by the creed of
Nicaea. If there was only one God, how could
Jesus be divine? Did that mean that there were two gods? And was there a third: What was the “
holy spirit,” which had been dealt with so perfunctorily in
Athanasius’s creed? In the New
Testament this Jewish term had referred to the human experience of the power and presence of the divine, which could never measure up to the divine reality itself. The Trinity was an attempt to translate this Jewish insight into a Hellenistic idiom. God, the Cappadocians explained, had one divine, inaccessible essence (
ousia
) that was totally beyond the reach of the human mind, but it had been made known to us by three manifestations (
hypostases
): the Father (source of being), the
Logos (in the man Jesus), and the Spirit that we encounter within ourselves. Each “person” (from the Latin
persona,
meaning “mask”) of the Trinity was merely a partial glimpse of the divine
ousia
that we could never comprehend. The Cappadocians introduced converts to the Trinity in a meditation, which reminded them that the divine could never be encapsulated in a dogmatic formula. Constantly repeated, this meditation taught Christians that there was a kenosis at the heart of the Trinity, because the Father ceaselessly emptied itself, transmitting everything to the Logos. Once that Word had been spoken, the Father no longer had an “I” but remained forever silent and unknowable. The Logos likewise had no self of its own but was simply the “Thou” of the Father, while the Spirit was the “We” of Father and Son.
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The Trinity expressed the paedeia’s values of restraint, deference, and self-abnegation, with which the more aristocratic bishops countered the current Christian stridency. Other bishops, alas, were all too ready to embrace it.

Constantine had given the bishops new authority for the exercise of imperial power, and some, especially those of humble birth, strove for the episcopate as pugnaciously as politicians compete for parliamentary seats today.
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Some even staged coups, taking over a church by night and barricading the doors during their illegal consecration.
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“At present we have men who claim to be bishops—a lowly breed who are bogged down in acquiring money and military operations and striving for honorable positions,” complained the historian
Palladius.
⁶⁹
They became known as “tyrant-bishops.” In ancient Greece, a
tyrannos
was a strongman who seized power by unlawful violence; in the later
Roman Empire, the word had general connotations of misrule, cruelty, and unrestrained anger.
⁷⁰
When Athanasius became a bishop, his opponents regularly called him a tyrant because, they claimed, he was motivated not by the desire to defend the faith but by personal ambition. He was described as “raging
like a tyrant” when he sentenced
Arians to prison, flogging, and torture, and it was noted that his entourage included “the military and officials of the imperial government.”
⁷¹
It was clearly easier to imperialize the faith than to
Christianize the empire.

During the late fourth century, rioting had become a regular feature of city life.
Barbarian tribes were ceaselessly attacking the frontiers, brigandage was rife in the countryside, and
refugees poured into the towns.
⁷²
Overcrowding, disease, unemployment, and increased taxes created a tension that often exploded violently, but because the army was needed to defend the borders, governors had no military forces to quell these uprisings and passed the responsibility for crowd control to the bishops.
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“It is the duty of a bishop like you to cut short and restrain any unregulated movements of the mob,” wrote the
patriarch of
Antioch to a colleague.
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The bishops of
Syria already relied on local monks to man their soup kitchens and serve as stretcher-bearers, hospital porters, and gravediggers. They were greatly loved by the people, especially the urban poor, who enjoyed their ferocious denunciations of the rich. Now they began to police the riots and in the process acquired martial skills.

Unlike
Antony’s
Egyptian monks, the monks of Syria had no interest in fighting the demon of anger. Known as
boskoi,
“grazers,” they had no fixed abode but roamed through the mountains at will, feeding on wild plants.
⁷⁵
One of the most famous boskoi was
Alexander the Sleepless, who had left a regular community of monks because he disapproved of its property ownership. He had wholly imbibed the post-
Julian ethos of “Never again,” and his first act, on emerging from seven solitary years in the desert, was to burn down the largest temple in a pagan village. There could be zero tolerance for the icons of the old religion, which were a standing threat to the security of the Church. Alexander lost out on the palm of
martyrdom, however, because he preached so eloquently to the mob that came to kill him that it converted to Christianity on the spot. He founded an order dedicated to “freedom from care,” so instead of working for their living, like Antony, his monks lived on alms, refusing to engage in productive labor. And instead of trying to control their anger, they gave it free rein.
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During the 380s, four hundred of them formed a massive prayer-gang and began a twenty-year trek along the
Persian border, singing in shifts all around the clock in obedience to Paul’s instructions to “pray without ceasing.”
⁷⁷
The hapless inhabitants of the villages on either side of the frontier were terrorized as the monks chanted the
psalmists’ bloodcurdling denunciations of idolatry. Their insistent begging made them an intolerable burden to these rural communities that could barely support themselves. When they arrived in a city, they squatted in a public space in the center, attracting huge crowds of urban poor who flocked to hear their fiery condemnation of the rich.

Those who did not feel badgered by them respected the monks for expressing the values of Christianity in an absolute way. For them, Alexander’s virulent intolerance of paganism showed that he really believed that Christianity was the one true faith. After Julian, some Christians increasingly defined themselves as a beleaguered community. They gathered around the tombs of local
martyrs, listened avidly to the stories of their suffering, and piously preserved the memory of Julian’s persecution, keeping alive their sense of injury. Many had no time for the courteous tolerance of the more aristocratic bishops.
⁷⁸
The pagan temples, which had symbolized the brief pagan revival, now seemed a standing threat that became increasingly intolerable. To add fuel to these flames, the emperors were now ready to exploit the monks’ popularity and let these zealots loose on the pagan world. They would enforce the
Pax Christiana as aggressively as they had previously imposed the
Pax Romana.