The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (34 page)

The poor had always been of concern in large cities due to their propensity to riot at times of famine; the larger cities, such as Rome, had long made use of “bread and circuses” programmes in place to placate them. In offering help to the poor, a bishop was thus sustaining a traditional “pagan” role while at the same time acting as a pastor to his flock. This was recognized by Constantine, who distributed largesse for the poor of major cities through the bishops. Those entitled to help were entered on poor lists kept by the church and only through a licence given by the bishop could anyone beg. This was one of the ways that he used the bishops for state ends.
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However, many bishops went far beyond any political needs in their active response to the poor. While in earlier centuries the giving of patronage had raised the status of the giver in this life, now the motivating force was redemption in the next. The contrast is vividly shown in an anecdote recounted by Ammianus Marcellinus of a Christian prefect of Rome, Lampadius, in 365.

When this man during his praetorship gave magnificent games and very abundant largesse and yet could not endure the taunts of the common people continually shouting that a mass of gifts should be given to persons unworthy to receive them, to show his generosity and contempt for them he summoned some of the destitute from the Vatican and presented them with valuable gifts.

Lampadius was turning conventional notions of patronage on their head; in this he was echoed by many bishops. Basil of Caesarea (in Cappadocia) urged his congregation, “As a great river flows by a thousand channels through a fertile country, so let your wealth run through many conduits to the houses of the poor. Wells that are drawn from flow better, left unused they go foul.”
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Basil is recorded as providing a great complex of hospitals and a leper colony, appropriately called Basileia. For the first time in classical literature, we see accurate descriptions of the homeless poor, disfigured by disease, living as if they were animals, huddled under the grand colonnades or corners of the agora. While we have no means of knowing what proportion of the church’s growing wealth was diverted to the poor, it was already adopting its medieval role as provider for the sick, one of its most effective and enduring functions until the rise of modern medicine and state care.

In short, the bishops combined the roles of spiritual leader, patron, estates manager, builder, overseer of law and order, city representative, and protector of the poor among others. This variety can be seen in the condolences sent by Basil of Caesarea to the people of Neocaesarea on the death of their bishop, Musonius.

Now withered is the bloom of your beauty; your church is dumb; your assemblies are full of mournful faces; your sacred synod craves its leader; your holy utterances wait for an expounder; your young men have a lost a father, your elders a brother; your nobles have lost a leader, your people their champion, and your poor their nurturer.
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However, the prestige of bishoprics was so high that they were often fought over. Gregory of Nazianzus recounts of the bishopric of Sasima in Cappadocia:

It was a no man’s land between two rival bishops. A division of our native province gave occasion for the outbreak of a frightful brawl. The pretext was souls, but in fact it was desire for control, control, I hesitate to say it, of taxes and contributions which have the whole world in miserable confusion.
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This “desire for control . . . of taxes and contributions” was a corrosive feature of church politics. The linking of access to resources with orthodoxy was bound to lead to nasty rivalries when doctrine was so fluid. In Alexandria, Athanasius’ chequered career meant that on three occasions one Christian faction was dislodged to be replaced by another, and the tax exemptions were transferred, to the fury of the dispossessed. There were many opportunities for the less scrupulous. The story is told of one bishop, Theodosius of Synnada in Phrygia, who was so angered by the heretics in his diocese that he set off to complain about them to the emperor in Constantinople. However, in his absence, the leading heretic, one Agapetus, declared that he had now become orthodox, seized control of the bishopric and was never to be dislodged.

Within a bishopric the different roles often came into conflict with each other. Cyril of Jerusalem was accused of selling off church treasures for poor relief at a time of famine (and this was a charge also brought against Ambrose by his Homoean opponents), while Theophilus of Alexandria, in contrast, was accused of diverting into his building programme money given to buy shirts for the poor. One of the complaints against Athanasius was that he had sold in the private markets grain specifically given to him by the emperor on behalf of the poor. For every Basil, ready to use his wealth for the poor, another diverted his to different ends. The case of Cyril of Alexandria, bishop from 412 to 444, illustrates the point well. His obsession was to discredit the rival bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, through having the latter declared a heretic for his views on the two natures of Christ. Having manipulated a council held at Ephesus to uphold his view, he had to convince the emperor Theodosius II to support him. This involved, as a document sent secretly by Cyril to agents in Constantinople reveals, massive bribery at court. The sum of 77,760 gold pieces—enough, it has been estimated, to feed and clothe 19,000 poor people for a year—tapestries, carpets, even ostrich eggs were made available for distribution, with double handouts to those known to oppose Cyril. This strategy worked. Nestorius was deposed and forced into exile, and in 435 Theodosius ordered the burning of all his writings.
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The original message of Christianity, set in a framework in which power, wealth, even conventional social ties were renounced, and proclaimed as it was by a spiritual leader who had suffered the most humiliating punishments the empire could administer, could be seen as a threat to that empire. Yet now Christian leaders were firmly embedded within the social, political and legal establishment. By tying the bishops into the imperial administration and at the same time giving them access to wealth and status (which they could, of course, use in a variety of ways so long as these did not subvert the social order), the state had achieved a major political transformation from which there would be no turning back. One consequence was that the balance of power between church and state had shifted so that the more confident and determined bishops were even prepared to assert church authority over the state. The prime example of this is Ambrose of Milan.

14

SIX EMPERORS AND A BISHOP Ambrose of Milan

Ambrose, bishop of Milan between 374 and 397, is perhaps the most fascinating example of how a bishop survived in the tricky and unsettled political climate of the late fourth century. His success meant that he is seen as one of the cornerstone figures of late-fourth-century Christianity, elevated together with his contemporaries Augustine and Jerome as one of the “Doctors of the Church.” Much is known about him: his own words have come down to us in his carefully crafted letters, and an outline of his career survives in a panegyrical account of his life by Paulinus, his secretary, a “life” that has been memorably described as like “a tour of a grand cathedral conducted by a well-informed and helpful but rather overawed guide.”
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It presents Ambrose as a confident church leader, always able to control events. Recent research, however, is probing below the surface of this presentation, suggesting that behind the facade of imperturbability was a much less secure man, one whose career was characterized by “hectic improvisation.”
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Milan was the linchpin of the western empire, well placed on the road network, its seventh city according to one ranking of 385. It was secure enough to serve as a court of the emperors but close enough to the northern borders to provide a base from which to launch campaigns against the barbarians. Understandably, it was a major priority of the emperors to maintain the city in good order. From 355 the bishop of Milan had been one Auxentius, a Homoean who had enjoyed the support of Constantius and Valentinian. On his death in 374, the peace of the city was threatened by unrest between the Homoeans and supporters of the Nicene Creed, and Ambrose, the local provincial governor, was summoned to keep order. To his surprise, he found himself acclaimed by the crowd and then accepted by the emperor Valentinian as the new bishop. He was not even a baptized Christian at the time, but within a week he had been baptized and installed. His sudden elevation is an example of just how far political needs, above all the need to keep good order, now predominated in church appointments.

Ambrose was at ease with the exercise of authority. He was the son of a praetorian prefect and had all the skills of the best of his class. To the outside world he maintained the impassive and impenetrable demeanour of a man born to dominate, and it was in vain that his most famous convert, Augustine, struggled to see behind the facade: “What hopes he nourished, what struggles he endured against the temptations that his very excellence brought or what solace he found in adversity, and what joys he felt upon the inner fact that were kept hidden in his heart when he tasted your [God’s] bread: these I could neither guess nor discover.”
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He was highly able, an effective orator with impressive administrative skills and a flair for manipulating situations to his political advantage. He was not, however (again like most of the class he came from), an original thinker, and although he knew Greek, he never fully penetrated the intricacies of the theologies he now diligently set to absorbing. His most famous pastoral work,
On the Duties of Ministers,
was largely a reworking from a Christian perspective of Cicero’s
On
Duties,
and when he began plagiarizing Greek works he earned himself a stern rebuke from the scholarly Jerome for “decking himself out like an ugly crow with someone else’s plumes.”
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Something of his natural austerity might be grasped from his preoccupation with virginity—he was one of the first theologians to preach the perpetual virginity of Mary, and he classified Christians according to their degree of sexual purity. His own chastity inspired others, notably Augustine, to make it a badge of Christian faith. Yet in his first years as bishop he seems to have achieved what Valentinian had hoped, good order between the rival Christian communities. Probably as a result of the close links he kept with Christians in Rome (Ambrose was known to see Damasus, bishop of Rome 366–84, as a father figure), he came to believe in the common divinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and he emerged as a fervent support of the Nicene Creed.

After the catastrophic defeat of Valens in Thrace, the young co-emperor Valentinian and his mother, Justina, fled to Milan from Pannonia. The powerful Justina was a committed Homoean, and she demanded from the emperor Gratian, her stepson, a basilica in Milan to be the preserve of the Homoeans. Gratian, who was still only twenty, with no firm religious views of his own and somewhat out of his depth in the political turmoil of the time, assented. The basilica granted to the Homoeans was probably the Basilica Portiana, later known as San Lorenzo, just outside the city walls. Its closeness to the palace suggests it may have been built in the reign of Constantius specifically as a Homoean church, with an attached mausoleum for the bodies of emperors.
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Ambrose found himself assailed by a Homoean community that not only was growing in confidence but also was swelled by refugees to the city. Doubtless complaints reached Gratian about Ambrose (Ambrose was charged with melting down plate donated to the churches by Homoeans, although Ambrose claimed that this was only to use the gold to ransom captives of the barbarians), and he finally asked Ambrose to give an account of his faith.

The result was the first two books of Ambrose’s defence of the Nicene Creed, De Fide.
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De Fide does little to develop the Nicene debate, simply adopting the belief, common in the west, that God, the Son and the Holy Spirit share a common divinity. Much of the work is a polemical attack on a range of beliefs which Ambrose brings together under the umbrella of Arianism. His method is to take a condemned figure or term and associate his opponents with it. This led to the creation of absurd alliances. So the Homoeans, who stressed the “likeness” of Father and Son, were grouped with those, closer to the original tradition of Arius, who stressed the
unlikeness
of the two. In sweeping condemnations reflecting Ambrose’s background as a politician, the Homoeans were dubbed as enemies of the state, and Ambrose even claimed that God had sent the Goths as invaders of the empire as vengeance for its heresies. This was emotive stuff and aroused such great opposition from the Homoean community and in particular from Palladius, bishop of Ratiaria, the most sophisticated of the Homoeans, that Ambrose was impelled to expand his views in three more books of
De Fide.

Whatever opposition
De Fide
aroused among the Homoeans, it impressed the uncertain Gratian, who seems to have been drawn to Ambrose as a father figure. In 380 or 381 Gratian moved his own court to Milan and announced that he himself would hold a council of bishops, from both east and west, which would meet at Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic, in September 381. He was upstaged by Theodosius’ own council of pro-Nicene bishops in Constantinople (the council described earlier), with the result that most of the bishops who attended at Aquileia were from northern Italy and were loyal adherents of Ambrose. Ambrose was an energetic networker and devoted a great deal of time to maintaining good relationships with his fellow bishops of northern Italy. Palladius arrived to defend the Homoean cause, to find to his horror that Ambrose had converted the “council” into a tribunal held in a side room to the basilica at Aquileia, with Ambrose installed on a special chair alongside the presiding pro-Nicene bishop. (The basilica has long since disappeared, but its magnificent fourth-century mosiac floor was rediscovered in the last century.) Palladius’ account of the proceedings survives and, even if biased in the writer’s cause, shows how Ambrose bullied his way through the proceedings by trying to associate Palladius with documents written by Arius that Palladius had neither seen nor was allowed to see. Ambrose also exerted his influence by insisting that every word be copied down by stenographers, a move which frightened Palladius, who knew the transcripts could be later used against him.
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The end result of the “council” was not a creed but, predictably, a carefully stage-managed condemnation of the Homoean bishops. Ambrose’s ascendancy over Gratian is suggested by the return, at about this time, of the Basilica Portiana to the Nicenes.
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Ambrose was not the only influence on the impressionable Gratian—there were other Christians in his court, many of them with links to Rome. When a group of senators travelled up from Rome with the traditional robes of the
pontifex maximus,
Gratian refused to accept them, the first emperor to make such a decisive break with the pagan world. (Ironically, the popes were later—in the fifteenth century—to adopt the title
pontifex maximus
as one of their own.) He also ended state subsidies to pagan ceremonies and ordered the Altar of Victory, on which sacrifices were made at the beginning of Senate meetings, to be removed from the Senate house in Rome. This was a much-resented intrusion and immediately a delegation of senators set out from Rome to protest. It was Ambrose, up to now apart from the debate, who persuaded Gratian that the senators should not be received.

Gratian never developed the toughness and tenacity needed to survive as emperor. In 383 he headed north at the head of his troops to confront German invaders, but his leadership was so unconfident that his men rose against him and executed him. Valentinian II, still in Milan, was now senior Augustus, but into the power vacuum in the north moved one Magnus Maximus, commander of the British legions, who had himself been acclaimed Augustus by his troops in the spring. Maximus hoped to lure the young Valentinian to Trier, where they could live, in Maximus’ words, as “father and son.” Ambrose knew how important it was to keep the young and malleable emperor in his own city, and he travelled himself to Trier to persuade Maximus, successfully, to defer the plan until winter had passed.

Next a new struggle broke out over the Basilica Portiana. While Gratian might have been able to stand up to Justina, her own son could not. Justina persuaded Valentinian to proclaim freedom of worship for those who were Homoeans and then attempted to reclaim the basilica for them. The first attempt to seize it, in 385, failed; in the second, the following year, imperial troops were sent to enforce Justina’s demand and take over the more central Basilica Nova, then the cathedral as well. Ambrose was determined not to give in. He filled the Basilica Nova with his supporters and enthused them with passionate oratory.
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The psalms were exploited for themes of persecution and a round of continuous hymn singing sustained morale. Historians of music note that the tense stand-off provides the first recorded instance in the west of a divided choir singing antiphonal hymns. The court was wise enough not to escalate the confrontation into violence, especially as its members became aware that Maximus, a staunch pro-Nicene who had possibly been alerted to the crisis by Ambrose himself, was considering taking the opportunity to enter Italy and depose Valentinian.
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The troops were withdrawn, but it was a humiliating climb-down for the court.

Ambrose may have appeared to have won a victory, but he remained vulnerable to Valentinian’s legislation, which allowed the execution of anyone interfering with Homoean worship. (It is important to remember that Theodosius’ imposition of Nicene orthodoxy applied only in the east.) He needed a major propaganda coup to deflate the court’s ambitions. Like most of the grander bishops of his day, Ambrose was an enthusiastic builder responsible for a number of large churches in Milan, among them the Basilica Ambrosiana, destined to be the city’s new cathedral, outside the city walls, where he himself planned to be buried under the altar. His pretensions were criticized—the bones of martyrs, or Apostles if they could be found, were more appropriate founding relics for a church than those of the builder—although Constantine had set a precedent in Constantinople that some felt Ambrose was following. Ambrose took the point and went on the search for relics. Sometime after Easter of 386, Ambrose, as he tells the story in a letter to his sister,
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had a presentiment that he knew where two local martyrs, Protasius and Gervasius, were buried. Sure enough, when the earth in the chosen spot was scraped away, two complete bodies were found. Their excellent preservation after perhaps some hundred years underground (there was even blood around their severed heads, Ambrose reported to his sister) might have cast doubt on the identification, but Ambrose hurriedly announced that this was the evidence that they were indeed the martyrs, miraculously preserved by God. As the bodies were carried off towards the Basilica Ambrosiana, the crowds surged round to touch them, and miracles were proclaimed, including the restoration of sight to a blind man who had wiped his sightless eyes with a handkerchief he had rubbed on the bones. Ambrose announced that this in itself proved that God supported the Nicene cause, and, in the mass hysteria of the moment, few disagreed.

Valentinian and Justina had been brilliantly out-manoeuvred, and in the volatile world of imperial politics it proved a massive blow to their credibility. Maximus, always alert to the weakness of the boy emperor, made his move in the summer of 387. He invaded Italy, and Valentinian and Justina had no alternative but to flee eastwards to Thessalonika and appeal to Theodosius for protection. Maximus arrived in Milan and appears to have attended Ambrose’s services, although we have no other record of their relationship. However, Theodosius agreed to take revenge on Valentinian’s behalf, and in 388 he himself marched into Italy, forced the surrender of Maximus at Aquileia and had him executed. Valentinian was restored as Augustus in the west and then set off to Gaul to regain the allegiance of his subjects there, while Theodosius remained in Milan.