The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (33 page)

Once a rationale had been created to divert the most precious of materials and the finest of buildings to Christian use, the old reservations were largely dissolved. In fact, the desire to create opulence came to condition the shape of architecture. The basilica was the most economical building type for a large congregation, but churches with central domes appeared with the dome reaching up to the sky, as if providing a representation of heaven itself. Domed churches provided no extra space for the congregation but were much more expensive to build; there was not only the construction and decoration of the dome itself to consider, but the walls also had to be strengthened to support its weight. The “Golden Octagon” of Antioch, consecrated in 341, was a magnificent early example; the dome of
Hagia Sophia
in Constantinople, described by the historian Procopius as appearing to be suspended from heaven, and still intact in its glory today, was perhaps the greatest. In Byzantine art the dome became ubiquitous, with God the Creator watching over the faithful from its centre. Byzantine services became a series of dramatic liturgical moments that the congregation, crammed in under the dome and separated from the sanctuary by the iconostasis, could experience rather than see.

If a church had now become a symbol of heaven, how were figures to be shown? The answer was to model them on the imperial court, the closest model for heaven on earth. An early example of the adoption of imperial themes for Christian iconography can be found on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, a Roman aristocrat who had served as city prefect and consul and had converted on his deathbed. His sarcophagus (of 359) was buried under the floor of St. Peter’s (and is now in the Vatican Museum). On the central lower panel of its elaborately carved facade, Christ is shown entering Jerusalem as if he was an emperor entering a city, and above this image he is shown sitting in glory on an imperial throne set above a representation of heaven. Sabine MacCormack notes how once Christ was represented with such imperial imagery the emperors ceased to make use of it: “Once an image of majesty had been applied to Christ it was impossible to apply it again to the emperor.” So the process by which Christ becomes integrated into the iconography of imperial government continued.
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In the mosaiced figures of the apses and walls of the churches of the subsequent centuries God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, the disciples and saints and martyrs are dressed as emperors or members of the imperial court. In the church of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Christ appears dressed in imperial purple, and the archangels Michael and Gabriel are depicted in court dress. The court itself (in the days of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora) is shown in the famous mosaics in San Vitale in Ravenna, and the Virgin Mary in the great basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome is dressed similarly to the attendants of the empress.
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The martyr who challenged the Roman empire and was extinguished by it now appears in mosaic as if he were one of its own grand officials. The point could not have been made better than in the case of St. Agnes, martyred in Rome after she resisted the advances of a praetor’s son. According to Prudentius, she trampled on all the vanities of the world, pomp, gold, silver garments, dwellings, anger, fear and paganism through the acceptance of her martyrdom. Her reward, in the depiction of her against a gold background in the apse of her basilica on the outskirts of Rome, is to become an empress draped with gems in heaven. Having rejected treasures on earth, she finds them with Christ.
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Just as the martyrs are transformed through their sanctification, so are the symbols of Christianity. A cross is now presented encrusted with gold, as in the magnificent apse mosaic in S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, or above the figure of Christ “the emperor” at S. Pudenziana. The Gospels are encased in jewelled covers as every aspect of church decoration is embellished with treasure.

While it was the emperors who initiated the massive patronage required to build these churches, it soon became a badge of faith for wealthy Christians to contribute. The most famous lay patron was Melania the Younger. Her annual income at the time of her marriage in 397 was said to be 120,000
solidi,
perhaps equivalent to over £200 million. This was wealth on the scale of the most successful entrepreneurs of today (although it was, of course, income from land), yet Melania gave much of it away to the church, including a donation for the foundation of a monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. In the same period in Constantinople, an aristocratic widow, Olympias, devoted immense riches to the church in Constantinople, while the empress Pulcheria gave a large jewelled chest to the church as a symbol of her commitment to virginity. In Rome it seems to have become the custom for each new bishop to make a foundation in his name that would be supported either by his own resources or those of a wealthy patron. So in the fifth century many of Rome’s greatest churches, including S. Sabina, S. Maria Maggiore and SS. Giovanni e Paolo, were first established. One act of patronage encouraged another. Melania the Younger gave to the local church at Thagaste “revenues as well as offerings of gold and silver treasures, and valuable curtains, so that this church which formerly had been so poor, now stirred up envy on the part of other bishops of the provinces.”
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In Ravenna, the seat of government of the Goth, and hence Homoean, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Homoeans and Nicenes struggled to outdo each other in the decoration of their churches. S. Apollinare Nuovo was one of Theodoric’s foundations (c. 494–526) and shows that Goths could be no less lavish than “Roman” Christians. An exquisite “Homoean” Gospel book, the
Codex Argenteus,
survives from these years. It is clear too that church building was now also a matter of civic pride. “Other benefactions contribute to the decor of a city, while outlays on a church combine beauty with a city’s renown for godliness . . . for wealth that flows out for holy purposes becomes an ever-running stream for its possessors,” as one proud Christian put it.
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The allure of churches was further enhanced by the practice of bringing martyrs’ bones and other relics to them, or, as in the case of St. Peter’s in Rome, of building churches over their supposed burial places. As the age of martyrs slipped into the past, so the martyrs themselves tightened their hold on the Christian imagination. In facing death, the martyrs had reached perfection, and their very bones became sacred, able to perform miracles. There was a rush to the Holy Land to find relics of the life of Jesus himself. By the end of the fourth century, the legend of Helena’s finding of the “True Cross” while on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem was fully established, and an improbably large number of churches around the Mediterranean claimed to have fragments of it. The opportune discovery of bones believed to be those of St. Stephen, Christianity’s first martyr, near Jerusalem in 415 aroused enormous enthusiasm, and they were paraded through north Africa and the western empire. Even Augustine, who had been sceptical of the power of relics, was won over on their arrival at Hippo. It was reported that they proclaimed themselves genuine through emitting a sweet smell. Most martyrs, of course, were the local casualties of the third- and early-fourth-century persecutions, and they were buried in cemeteries outside the city walls. The translation of their bones to a church inside the city (thus breaking ancient taboos against burial within the walls) was a highly significant moment in the definition of a Christian community. When the state condemned (in a law of 386, for instance) the unseemly practice of breaking up and distributing parts of dead bodies, Christians took no notice. It was argued that each part of a martyr’s body, however small, retained the sacred potency of the whole. The major shrines, particularly those of early Christianity, now attracted worshippers from far afield, and so the great pilgrimage routes of the Mediterranean became established. An early record of pilgrimage survives by Egeria, a Spanish-born nun, who reached the Holy Land in 384, recording her trip in a diary.

The finest churches were those of the great cities, particularly those with links to the court or early Christianity. There were many dioceses beyond the reach of patronage where Christians had to make do with converted temples or bathhouses for churches, but within an empire under increasing financial stress the church held a privileged position. It enjoyed exemption from tax on any of its estates and property, and the growth of asceticism led, paradoxically perhaps, to a massive renunciation of private wealth in its favour, much of which went into further building projects. Inevitably the concerns of the bishops were enlarged. John Chrysostom complained that they were now more like merchants and shopkeepers than guardians of men’s souls and protectors of the poor. Their estates, properties, churches and institutions transformed them into estate managers and financial overlords as well as major employers. The staff of one church alone, the great
Hagia Sophia
in Constantinople, numbered some 500 in the middle of the sixth century.
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There are reports that bishoprics in Asia Minor could be bought.
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Although bishops exercised authority alongside the provincial governors, their status and influence made them major figures in their own right. They held office often for life (in comparison, a provincial governor may have stayed in post for only two or three years), and they had direct access to their congregation week by week in the pulpit. Inevitably, the more effective bishops absorbed the traditional responsibilities now increasingly evaded by the city elites. There are even cases of bishops— Synesius of Cyrene is a good example—securing the removal of an unpopular local governor. When riots broke out in Antioch in 387 and statues of the emperor were torn from their pedestals, the elderly Bishop Flavian interceded with the imperial commissioners who came to investigate the sacrilege and then hurried to Constantinople himself to plead, successfully as it turned out, with Theodosius for mercy on his city. Now that the church was free from all taxation, a key episcopal role was mediating with local government to extend the exemptions (not only from tax but also from military service) as widely as possible. Basil of Caesarea, for instance, fought against attempts by the imperial government to limit the number of clergy in a diocese who could claim tax exemption, arguing that the church should have an absolute right to decide for itself who should and should not be clergy. The largest group of his letters consists of pleas to local officials for relief from taxation or military service—in this he was exercising the traditional role of the city elite in which personal status depended heavily on the ability to create a network of satisfied clients through representing their cases with the imperial administration. Soon bishops were drawn into keeping law and order themselves. A later bishop of Antioch excused his late arrival at the Council of Ephesus in 431 on the grounds that he had been suppressing riots; another bishop wrote to a colleague, “It is the duty of bishops like you to cut short and to restrain any unregulated movements of the mob.”
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Synesius organized the defence of Cyrene and its surrounding estates from the incursions of desert nomads, and sometimes bishops even had to quell bands of enthusiastic monks who had come to desecrate pagan temples. As always in the empire, the desire for good order was more important than the condoning of Christian iconoclasm. There is vivid recognition of this in an edict preserved in the Theodosian Code of 438: “We especially command those persons who are truly Christians that they shall not abuse the authority of religion and dare to lay violent hands on Jews and pagans, who are living quietly and attempting nothing disorderly or contrary to the law. For if such Christians should be violent against people living in security or should plunder their goods they shall be compelled to restore triple or quadruple that amount which they robbed.”

The men who could perform such roles were necessarily drawn from the traditional elites, and it was accepted that they would already be land-owning men of authority and education. “The cultural and social milieu which nurtured the urban upper classes of late antiquity did not distinguish future bishops from future bureaucrats,” as one scholar puts it, a point that could equally be made of eighteenth-century French bishops and nineteenth-century English bishops, so enduring was the transformation of the bishop’s status.
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Even as early as 343 a council of western bishops meeting at Serdica agreed that bishops should be allowed time away from their sees if they needed to visit property they held as individuals outside them. Peter Brown has described how bishops acquired or absorbed
paideia,
“the exquisite condensation of hard won skills of social living
. . . Paideia
offered ancient almost proverbial guidance . . . on courtesy, on the prudent administration of friendship, on the control of anger, on poise and persuasive skill when faced by official violence.”
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Well might Gregory of Nyssa complain that the Church’s leaders were consuls, generals and prefects, distinguished in rhetoric and philosophy, and no longer the ordinary men who had been Christ’s disciples.
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As we have seen, the leaders of the second sophistic (see p. 62) had shown the uses of rhetoric in maintaining the status of the city elites. Most bishops were skilled speakers and knew how to play on emotions and rouse a crowd in their support. Ambrose of Milan was a master of oratory, and his most significant convert, Augustine, had first arrived in Milan from north Africa as the official city orator. A more subtle use of a congregation was to use it to pass a message to the imperial authorities. When the empress Eudoxia visited Jerusalem, she was met by a Christian congregation that had been coached by a local monk, Barsauma, to chant anti-Jewish slogans. “ ‘The cross conquered,’ went the chant, and the voice of the people spread and roared for a long time like the great noise of the waves of the sea, so that the inhabitants of the city trembled because of the noise of the shouting . . . And the events were announced [presumably by Eudoxia and her retinue] to the emperor Theodosius [II].”
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