The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (22 page)

With scripture to draw on and an evolving sense of tradition, the formulation of Christian doctrine gradually took shape. The affirmation of God the Father and Creator, Jesus the Son, whose death and resurrection had raised the possibility of salvation for all who repented, and a Holy Spirit who continued to act as a divine force in the world, formed the core of Christian belief. But the details of such doctrine were blurred, and there were many conflicting interpretations of the status, purpose and relationships between the three divine forces. There was not even a consensus on what salvation meant—the Church Fathers disagreed strongly on who was being saved, from what and for what purpose.
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In short, the diversity of the early Christian experience cannot be overstressed: like spiritual movements in the Greco-Roman world, Christianity fragmented as it spread, and the fragmentation became more pronounced because of the variety of the scriptural and traditional sources on which doctrine could be based. Yet, and perhaps for this reason, the search for authority became more intense and with it came an increasing stress on an institutional hierarchy. An early statement of orthodoxy comes from Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons from 178 to 200. The
Adversus Omnes Haereses
(to give it the Latin title by which it is normally known, although it was originally written in Greek) is one of the more important documents of the early church. Irenaeus was responding to critics who claimed that the diversity of the scriptures made it difficult to find a coherent message in them and that they should be open to interpretation by individuals. Not so, says Irenaeus. The Apostles knew what the truth was (he assumed that the Apostles were all of one mind), and they passed it down through their successors. Only those in direct succession from the Apostles “have received the sure gift of the truth according to the pleasure of the Father . . . the rest we must regard with suspicion, either as heretics or evil minded.” He was echoed by Tertullian: “wherever it has become apparent that the truth of Christian teaching and faith exists, there will be the truth of the scriptures and of their interpretations and of all Christian traditions.”
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This truth exists only for those in true apostolic succession, in effect, the bishops.

It was Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248 until his martyrdom in 258, who made the firmest and most influential assertion of a bishop’s authority. Cyprian was deeply humiliated in the persecution of 251, when the majority of his flock sacrificed to the pagan gods rather than face martyrdom, but he then found that his priests were readmitting the backsliders to the church. As the persecution waned, he called together his fellow north African bishops, who agreed that any readmission to the church could only take place publicly under the direct authority of the bishop through the rite of baptism, and then only after an admission of guilt. Only those who had stood firm could carry out the baptism: a baptism by anyone, even a bishop, who had buckled under persecution was invalid and would leave the “baptized” one “stained and polluted by the unholy water of heretics and schismatics.” In reiterating, in his
De Unitate,
“On the Unity of the Church,” that only bishops who had resisted persecution had the right to carry out the baptisms, Cyprian stressed the authority bishops had by virtue of their office. “Does anyone who acts against the bishops of Christ think that he is with Christ . . . he carries arms against the Church . . . he fights against the will of God . . . he is an enemy of the altar, a rebel against Christ’s sacrifice.”
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Cyprian describes the bishop in similar terms to that of a provincial governor, having absolute authority in his province with his opponents described as rebels. This was a crucial stage in the evolution of church authority in that it adopted a powerful terminology of rebellion with which to describe heretics and was part of the process by which any avenues for the making of doctrine outside the institutional church were closed off. Cyprian assiduously built up support among his fellow bishops (some eighty-seven of them at one African synod he called in 256), even receiving support from as far afield as Cappadocia in Asia Minor.

Cyprian was adamant in his condemnation of any who promoted schism, but one was now in the making. On the issue as to whether those who had themselves lapsed could rebaptize Christians, Cyprian, who, as we have seen, believed they could not, embarked on a bitter conflict with the bishop of Rome, Stephen, who maintained that the lapsed clergy retained the power to baptize. The bishops of Rome, as successors of Peter, who, according to tradition, had been martyred in the city, had already tried to insist on their primacy over other bishops and had been supported by Irenaeus’ assertion in his
Adversus Haereses
that Rome was the see “with which all must be in agreement.” Yet Rome’s efforts had not as yet met with much success: for example, an attempt in the 190s to tell the Asian bishops on what date they should celebrate Easter had been rebuffed. As a result of Cyprian’s influence, Stephen was isolated. Firmilian, the bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to him: “Cut yourself off you most certainly have . . . since the genuine schismatic is the person who has made himself an apostate from the communion and the unity of the church. While imagining it was in your power to excommunicate everyone, you have in fact succeeded in excommunicating yourself alone, from everyone else!” While by the third century there is the concept of a single church (“He no longer has God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother,” wrote Cyprian), which through its bishops, its traditions and the scriptures defines orthodoxy, the reality seems to have been very different. The view put forward by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century, in what was the first detailed history of the church, that it had always been a monolithic institution with a unified faith, easily defensible from the heresies that pestered it, has little historical backing.
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While Christians looked back to the canon of scriptures and to tradition, they also accepted the continuing activity of God in the world in the form of miracles and portents that were effected through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s earlier role as a revealer of divine truths was, after the suppression of the Montanists, somewhat in abeyance. The Acts of the Apostles are full of miracles (clearly attributed to the Holy Spirit), and in the early Christian centuries the effecting of miracles became a sign that an individual was favoured by God (who was responsible for the miracle itself). So at Ephesus, where Paul had so ignominiously been driven out for threatening the lucrative worship of the goddess Diana, the Apostle John succeeded where Paul had failed by praying in front of her temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, as a result of which half the temple apparently fell down and a mass conversion followed (from the apocryphal Acts of John 38–45). Similarly, in Caesarea in the persecution of 305, when a Christian was executed by drowning, an earth tremor was felt and the body was washed ashore. The whole town was so overcome by this apparently unambiguous sign of the wrath of God that they converted en masse.

Stories of the exorcism of demons are particularly prevalent in early Christianity. Demons (who were believed to be the offspring of intercourse between fallen angels and earthly mothers—they had to have an origin later than the creation of the world as God could not have created anything evil) pervade the world of early Christianity. Far from disbelieving in the pagan gods, the Christians saw them as demons who were very much “alive.” Ramsay MacMullen, in his survey of conversions before the toleration of 312, sees the “driving out of spirits and the laying of hands” on those possessed by demons as an essential part of the Christian drama as acted out for non-believers.
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A story about the ascetic Anthony makes the point well, while also reinforcing Paul’s claim that Christians outperformed the philosophers. A group of philosophers had visited Anthony, who proclaimed that the way to show the fruits of faith was to perform a miracle. He called up some local madmen.

“Look now; here are some folk suffering from demons. Either cleanse these men by your logic chopping or by any other skill or magic you wish, or otherwise, if you can’t, lay down your quarrel with us and witness the power of Christ’s cross.” And with these words he called on Christ, sealed the sufferers with the sign of the cross twice and a third time, and straightaway the men stood forth all healed.
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Inevitably a church that relied heavily on miracles as a means of securing status was vulnerable to criticism by intellectuals. One pagan response was that if a god had to resort to miracles to show his power, then he had surrendered his dignity. Celsus claimed that Christians were able “to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid and only slaves, women and little children.”
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He was echoed by the physician Galen, who criticized Christians for their adherence to faith rather than reason and for relying on “undemonstrated laws.”
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There was some truth in these attacks. As we have seen, Paul had condemned the “philosophers,” and his stress on “faith” rather than reason had shifted Christianity outside the world of traditional Greek philosophy with its stress on rational argument. This approach had now become a handicap. It was common for students in the Greek world to go from one school of philosophy to another, listening to debates and querying positions taken, and unless Christians were able to take part in such debates, Christianity was unlikely to achieve intellectual respectability. In a growing church, most Christians at any one time were converts, and there were many who had had a traditional training in philosophy either before encountering Christianity or while waiting for baptism. Some kind of accommodation had to be made with Greek philosophy. The Christian Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165), a Platonist by training, was among the first to argue that Christianity could draw on both scriptures and Greek philosophy and could even appropriate philosophy for its own ends. “Whatever good they [the philosophers] taught belongs to us Christians.” He was echoed by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), who claimed that God had given philosophy to the Greeks as “a schoolmaster” until the coming of the Lord as “. . . a preparation which paved the way towards perfection in Christ.” “If those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful [
sic
] use of it . . . ,” added Augustine some 200 years later.
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Whether the pagan philosophers were able to recognize the fact or not, their concept of
logos,
reasoning power, could be equated with the
logos
that was Christ. This strand of thought was developed so that Greek philosophers were even said to have absorbed “Christian” insights from the Old Testament, which they were assumed to have read. The theologian and historian Eusebius claimed that it was possible to find almost all of Plato’s philosophy mirrored in the Old Testament. There was therefore no necessary contradiction between Greek philosophy and Christianity, but now that the
logos
had been incarnated as Jesus, the world had, Clement argued, moved into a new phase of history. The pagan philosophers should not be discarded, but their writings should be studied in such a way that their “Christian” teachings were disentangled from the rest. In the west, however, there continued to be a strong distrust of pagan philosophy, although Stoicism appears to have been an important influence for some, such as Tertullian.

Clement was in effect drawing on Middle Platonism, which stressed the power of “the Good” or “the One” to act in the world through the Platonic Forms. Platonism was ideally suited to providing the intellectual backbone of Christianity in that Platonists, particularly Middle Platonists, were dealing with the concept of an unseen, immaterial world in which “the Good,” or God, could be described as absolute while at the same time being able to have a creative and loving role. Middle Platonists had developed the idea of the human soul from earlier Greek philosophy. They saw the soul as distinct from the human body and able to exist independently of it and to make its own relationship with a providential God, who, in his turn, might reach out to it lovingly and creatively through the Forms, or “thoughts of God,” as they were now described by Christian theologians. The
logos
was one of these thoughts, but distinguished by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. It helped that Platonism had never compromised with the Greek gods and their mythology.

Platonism was to prove helpful in another sense. The Platonists argued that only a few could glimpse the reality of the immaterial world, including the true nature of “the Good”/God, but could prescribe what it consisted of for the rest. This was to be used to support the rationale for church authority, if the “few” were equated with the Christian hierarchy. The theologian Origen put the matter succinctly when he showed how the concept of faith could be used to keep the “multitude” in line: “As this matter of faith is so much talked of, I have to reply that we accept it as useful for the multitude, and that we admittedly teach those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons” (my emphasis).
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Here the concept of faith has shifted, from being a state of openness to revelation (or directly to the teachings and personal charisma of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels) to one of being ready to accept what is authoritatively decreed by the church hierarchy. The readiness to do this without questioning becomes a virtue in itself. So reasoning, as an intellectual power open to every man in the sense proclaimed by Aristotle, is now reserved for the few. In effect, Platonism offered no threat to the evolving authority structure of the church—if anything it reinforced it. As is clear from the subsequent history of the churches, the idea that there are set dogmas laid down by church leaders that have to be believed by those entering the Christian communities and that cannot be challenged intellectually by either insiders or outsiders became part of the essence of Christianity. It should also be remembered that Plato had denigrated the natural world as inferior to the immaterial world of the Forms, and so the adoption of Platonism did nothing to undermine Paul’s condemnation of any philosophy that concerned itself with finding truth in the material world.