Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (18 page)

During his forty-six years as bishop, Athanasius was deposed and sent into exile
five times.
Since doctrinal tradition was not yet fixed, bishops who supported Arius and regarded Athanasius as the heretic voted to depose him, and sometimes succeeded in persuading Constantine and his sons to replace him with bishops from their own ranks. But each time, Athanasius sought and found supporters throughout the empire and wrote furiously, often from exile, against his opponents. His admirers saw him as a man courageous enough to take on the whole world—“Athanasius against the world,” they called him—while his opponents characterized him as “a rich and powerful man, capable of anything.”
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Athanasius campaigned tirelessly against Christians who questioned or qualified the phrases in the Nicene Creed, calling them Arians, to imply that they were not real Christians but only schismatic followers of the exiled priest Arius. In return, at various times throughout his career, his enemies accused Athanasius of everything from preventing shipments of grain to be sent from Alexandria to Constantinople to violently attacking his opponents—even of having arranged the murder of a hostile bishop named Arsenius. While both sides sometimes resorted to violence,
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Athanasius insisted that these charges were absurd. When Arsenius turned up alive, Athanasius declared himself vindicated and called on his supporters

When Constantine died and his son Constantius took power, Athanasius’ opponents redoubled their efforts to unseat the powerful bishop. The young emperor attended a council of bishops held in Antioch in 338, which confirmed the decision of a council held the previous year, in which the bishops sided with Arius and his supporters and voted to depose Athanasius. Constantius ordered Athanasius to vacate his office and go into exile. Defiant, Athanasius remained in Alexandria until the magistrates sought to arrest him; then he fled the city and left Egypt. Later, writing from exile, Athanasius declared that his opponents, of whatever party, were not Christians at all but “the devil’s people,”
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whom he derisively called by the names of their leaders. Those loyal to Melitius, he said, were just as bad as Arius’ supporters, because “Melitians and Arians mingle their respective errors like the cup of Babylon.”
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Thus, as the conflict intensified, Athanasius increasingly interpreted the
whore
of Babylon, who drinks human blood, no longer as
Rome
but rather as
heresy personified.
Writing his own version of conflict over the Nicene Creed, Athanasius charged that those he called heretics “want to … shed my blood!”
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During these protracted battles, Athanasius challenged Bishop Melitius, who had criticized Athanasius’ predecessor, Bishop Peter, for hiding during the persecutions. Since Melitius had supervised the churches during Peter’s absence, he claimed to represent “the church of the martyrs,” implying that Peter had disqualified himself as bishop by fleeing the city. Now, some thirty years later, Athanasius had to compete with Melitius’ followers for the favor of the new emperor, Constantine’s son Constantius. Athanasius charged that his opponents were opportunists who
would do anything to gain a bishop’s new prerogatives—tax exemptions and imperial patronage. When Constantius supported Arius’ teaching and promoted Melitius’ followers, Athanasius wrote mockingly that “from being Melitians, they eagerly and quickly became Arians.”
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Still writing from exile, Athanasius insisted that the bishops who replaced him and his allies had been chosen “because of the wealth and civil power they possessed,” as well as the bribes that he said they offered, so that “when Antichrist comes, he shall find that the churches in Egypt are already his own.”
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During this controversy, Athanasius raised a basic question:
how could an emperor validate a bishop?
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Ignoring his own early appeal for Constantine’s support for his election, he asked rhetorically: when did Christian churches ever recognize a magistrate’s order? Above all, how could they obey
Constantius’
orders, after he had “commanded Athanasius to be expelled from the city and publicly ordered that the bishops of the Catholic faith be thrown out of their churches, and that they all be given up to those professing Arian teachings”? Athanasius dared accuse the emperor Constantius not only of clearing the way for Antichrist but of having
become
Antichrist himself: “How can he fail to be regarded as Antichrist?”
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Like Bishop Irenaeus two centuries earlier,
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Athanasius turned John’s visions of cosmic war into a weapon against those he called heretics—“Melitians,” “Arians,” or, in his favorite phrase, “Ariomaniacs,” who “fight against Christ.” Athanasius insisted that Constantine had been right to promote the council at Nicea as uniquely valid, since there, he said, “all the fathers” had supported the true faith against the “Antichristian heresy.” When living in
an empire ruled by a Christian who supported his Arian opponents, then, Athanasius interpreted John’s Book of Revelation as condemning all “heretics,” and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon, where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any
other
“books of revelation,” which he branded heretical and sought to destroy—with almost complete success.

For although Irenaeus, in his massive book
Against Heresies,
had denounced such “secret books” two hundred years earlier, Athanasius knew that many Christians in Egypt either were unaware of that ancient warning or ignored it.
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Many continued to copy and read such books for devotional use, even translating them into Coptic to make them more accessible. Athanasius had heard, too, that in some monasteries monks read and discussed such “secret books” both in private and in their communal devotions. These books have remained largely unknown, since nearly all copies were destroyed as heretical after the fourth century; but the cache of more than fifty socalled Gnostic gospels and “secret books” found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, survived Athanasius’ order. Although we don’t know exactly who hid them there or where they had previously been kept,
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they had been buried in a sealed jar within walking distance of three monasteries, near caves where monks went to meditate and pray.

Athanasius realized that in order to unite all Christians in Egypt under his leadership, he would have to take on the monasteries, and this would not be easy. Many of these monasteries had sprung up throughout Egypt independent of any centralized church authority; some monks, too, looked to monastery leaders and spiritual teachers, not bishops, for direction.
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Athanasius
knew that many other Christians also sought God in ways not directly connected with Catholic Christianity and that they treasured “secret books” loosely associated with teachings of the Egyptian Christian teacher Origen, with philosophers like Plato and Plotinus, and even with traditions associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Greek god Hermes. Athanasius’ project committed him and his clergy to power struggles that would engage him for the rest of his life.

The monastic movement had flourished throughout Egypt, especially in rural areas, ever since Constantine first legalized Christianity. Even before Constantine, Christians told stories of great spiritual heroes and sought to emulate them—men and women who left ordinary life behind, choosing to seclude themselves at home or in shelters clustered outside of towns or to go into the barren desert to search for God. Such stories told how these ascetics took on rigorous physical and spiritual disciplines as “exercise” (
ascesis,
in Greek), since they saw themselves as “athletes for God.” Although such seekers often sought advice from older ascetics, and many gathered on Sundays to worship with others living nearby, they called themselves “solitaries,” or “single ones” (in Greek,
monachoi,
later translated as “monks”),
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since they had given up family life to practice celibacy.

Stories of Anthony of Egypt, one of the pioneers of the movement, told how, as a young man, he had “left the world” of his village to live in solitude for decades, first in a cemetery, then in a desert shelter, until his visions and reputation for holiness had spawned legends, and countless Christians sought him out as their mentor. Some hunters, too, told how, having met one of those solitary seekers in the desert and asked what he was doing there,
he replied, “I’m a hunter too—I’m hunting for my God.” Others told of the “old man” Lot, who, when questioned, stood up and raised his fingers “like ten torches of fire” and said, “If you are willing, you can become a living flame!”
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When Athanasius was still a boy, shortly after Constantine legalized Christianity, an exsoldier named Pachomius, inspired by such stories, set out to devote his life to God. Pachomius had been conscripted into the Roman army during the 290s and had first met Christians when some of them brought food and comfort to the new soldiers, then billeted in a cold and drafty camp in Upper Egypt. After Pachomius’ release from the army in 313, he sought baptism. Yet much as he admired stories of courageous hermits, Pachomius hesitated to follow their example. Hadn’t Jesus urged his followers to “love one another”? And couldn’t one build an actual society on that principle? Pachomius said he had received a divine revelation telling him to build a communal house that he hoped would become an outpost of heaven on earth. Claiming his vision’s guidance, he urged others seeking God not to live simply as “solitaries” but as members of a spiritual community. Pachomius persuaded a few followers to work with him and build a mud-and-brick house that could accommodate several hundred men, a building later called by the paradoxical term
monasterium
—in effect, a “community of solitaries.”
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After they finished building, Pachomius, acting as “father” (
abba
), set up for the “brothers” who joined him a rotating schedule of work, prayer, and worship, while he himself cooked and served their meals and supervised the whole group. Several years later, after this communal house had attracted many more rural Egyptians, including many experiencing economic hardship, by
offering shelter, food, and work in the setting of a spiritual family, Pachomius traveled to a village near Nag Hammadi to supervise the building of a much larger monastery. This one, built to house thousands of volunteers, would later become the headquarters of a network of nine monasteries that he and his staff would supervise along the Upper Nile, along with two affiliated communities of women. For women, too, had joined the movement, some living together in large private houses, others in monasteries built for them. Each group worked to sustain itself economically while remaining in contact with the whole federation, which Pachomius named “the Community” (
koinonia,
in Greek).

At the large communal house near Nag Hammadi, fifty miles north of present-day Luxor, some monks worked in the fields to raise lentils, okra, and grain, while others washed clothes, cleaned rooms, cooked, baked bread, and wove baskets and rope to sell at markets in town to support the community’s needs. New recruits who arrived knowing how to read and write worked in a room set aside as a library. Some copied Coptic manuscripts of the Scriptures and other writings, while those who knew Greek translated sacred writings from Greek into Coptic to be read to the whole community. Later tradition reports that such recruits were expected to teach illiterate brothers to work through some of the Psalms and the New Testament, or at least memorize large passages from both, so that they could better participate in worship and devotions. We do not know whether what we call the Nag Hammadi texts came from this monastery, as seems likely;
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but we can reconstruct how such books were read. For after finishing the day’s work and the evening meal of bread, vegetables, olives, and water, the community would gather for devotions, as Pachomius
or another experienced monk would open in prayer, then speak to them and read aloud from sacred books.

As evening darkened into night, a newcomer seated among his monastic “brothers” might hear sacred readings from the Scriptures and, since no New Testament canon had yet been codified, also from books that Athanasius would condemn as “heretical.”
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As the reader opened the heavy leather cover of Codex I, one of the thirteen volumes found at Nag Hammadi, and began to read the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, written on the flyleaf, a newcomer listening to evening devotions might have shared in the intense expectation it expresses:

This prayer speaks to those who long for communion with God, and who hope to glimpse what the apostle Paul called “the deep things of God.”
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The reader would probably conclude with the exclamation that the scribe had added to the prayer—“Christ is holy!” Then, turning to the Secret Revelation of James on the next page, he might begin to speak, in effect, in the words of Jesus’ brother James as he answers a seeker’s request