The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (42 page)

Others would suffer as a result of conflicts between the religious and secular authorities. When Cyril became bishop of Alexandria in 412, he asserted himself with some energy. His “shock troops,” the
parabalani,
were viewed with such terror that the emperor himself had to ask that their numbers be limited to 500. Virtually every tension in the city was exacerbated by Cyril’s intrusions. The city prefect Orestes, who was attempting to resist the encroachment on his secular powers, was injured by a mob of monks, Jewish synagogues were seized, but most shocking of all was the murder by a Christian mob of Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician (who had written commentaries, now lost, on Diophantus and Apollonius). She was attacked on the streets and her body pulled to pieces. This was more than the death of a respected intellectual: for the historian of mathematics Morris Kline, “the fate of Hypatia symbolises the end of the era of Greek mathematics,” and Edward Gibbon makes her death a set piece in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.
³⁴

It was, however, only under Justinian, emperor 527–65, that the full weight of the law was enforced against paganism. One of his laws of the 530s signals the end of the imperial toleration extended to all religions by Constantine in 313:

All those who have not yet been baptised must come forward, whether they reside in the capital or in the provinces, and go to the very holy churches with their wives, their children, and their households, to be instructed in the true faith of Christianity. And once thus instructed and having sincerely renounced their former error, let them be judged worthy of redemptive baptism. Should they disobey, let them know that they will be excluded from the state and will no longer have any rights of possession, neither goods nor property; stripped of everything, they will be reduced to penury, without prejudice to the appropriate punishments that will be imposed on them.
³⁵

The death penalty was decreed for those who practised pagan cults. Pagan teachers (who included, of course, philosophers) were banned and their licence,
parrhesia,
to instruct others was withdrawn. The term
parrhesia
had been used for a thousand years to denote “freedom of speech.” Justinian was not content with empire-wide bans, which could easily be evaded by local elites, but aimed at specific centres of paganism. So it was now that after 900 years of teaching Plato’s Academy was closed in Athens in 529 (the displaced philosophers sought refuge in Persia), and the last of the functioning Egyptian temples, that to Isis on the island of Philae in southern Egypt, was shut down in 526.

Yet even then paganism continued to flourish. There is a vivid account from John, bishop of Ephesus, that records how in 542 he went inland into the mountains and found thousands of pagans still worshipping at traditional temples with pagan sacrifices. The main temple near the town of Thralles claimed that it had jurisdiction over 1,500 other shrines. This testimony, which was discovered only by chance in a manuscript found in an Egyptian monastery in the nineteenth century and now in the British Museum, shows that we should be very hesitant in talking of “the triumph” of Christianity. Even among Christians, archaeological evidence (in the shape of inscriptions) from Anatolia suggests that in many parts of Asia Minor groups known to be heretics and schismatics were in the majority.
³⁶
While eventually the Byzantine empire does present itself as Christian in its very essence, in vast areas of the former eastern empire spiritual allegiances were to change with the ebb and flow of history. So it is that in 515 at Zoara, south of the Dead Sea, a local god, Theandrites, was replaced by St. George and his temple reconstituted as a church with the inscription “God has his dwelling where there was once a hostel of demons; redeeming light now shines where once darkness spread its veil; where once sacrifices were made to idols, angels now dance.”
³⁷
(Note the presence of either demons or angels.) Yet just over 100 years later another spiritual transition took place as the Arabs swept through the Holy Land, Syria, Egypt and beyond. Now at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem a different faith proclaims itself:

O you people of the Book, overstep not bounds in your religion, and of God speak only the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed unto Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and the apostles, and say not Three. It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from his glory that he should have a son.
³⁸

It is worth remembering in this context the statement made by the sophist Maximus in A.D. 390 that nobody denies that “the supreme God” is “without offspring.” So, while Byzantium survived as a Christian theocratic state, around it other pieces of the puzzle that still define world politics in the twenty-first century were being put in place.

18

THE EMERGENCE OF CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY IN THE WEST, 395–640

Traditional Catholic histories of Christianity present Peter in his later years as a man who brims with conviction, energy and vision. His ambivalence about his mission to the Gentiles (as seen in the dispute with Paul at Antioch) had been resolved after God commanded him to extend his mission to the Gentiles (Acts of the Apostles 10). He set off to Rome because it was the capital of the empire, and he knew that it was the ideal place to establish the Church.
¹
A later tradition even suggests that he was bishop of Rome for no less than twenty-five years before his martyrdom. Yet, while there is no reason to doubt Peter’s convictions, he was actually heading to the far edges of the Christian world. The early church was predominantly Greek and flourished far more vigorously in the eastern than in the western empire, and from an eastern perspective the city of Rome was the “wrong” side of Italy. In Acts Paul tells of his great difficulties in travelling from Judaea to Rome (though admittedly his voyage was at a time of year when the weather had broken). Some six centuries later Pope Gregory the Great summed up the remoteness of Rome from the traditional Greek centres of Christianity. “Separated from you by great stretches of land and the sea,” he wrote to his brother bishops in Antioch and Alexandria, “yet I am bound to you in my heart.” The geographical separation was intensified by the linguistic gulf between the two parts of the empire, which grew as the Roman community became Latin—rather than Greek-speaking as it had been originally. The works of many of the Greek Church Fathers never reached the Latin west in translation. There were even difficulties in getting hold of Latin texts of the ecumenical councils.
²

Even within Rome the Christian community was marginal in a city where the pagan senatorial aristocracy remained powerful to the end of the fourth century. In the dispute over the Altar of Victory in the Senate house in the 380s, it was Ambrose in Milan, where he had direct access to the emperor, a vital consideration so far as ecclesiastical power was concerned, who masterminded its removal, rather than Damasus, the bishop of Rome. Although lip service was paid to the concept of Roman primacy, particularly in the western empire where Rome had no rivals, attempts by the bishops of Rome to enforce this primacy had not been successful. In particular, as the conflict between Stephen and Cyprian of Carthage in the third century had shown, the Christians of north Africa were vigorous, independent-minded and reluctant to submit to anyone. Rome’s political position within the empire atrophied over the centuries and received a further blow when the first Christian emperor himself set up his new capital at Constantinople. Then, at the Council of Constantinople of 381, Constantinople was made second in honour only to Rome as a bishopric. What hurt Rome in particular was that this move implied that a bishopric’s authority was based as much on its political importance as on its Christian origins. This was the situation when the empire was split in 395.

Part of the problem was, of course, the difficulty of translating a movement deeply rooted in the Greek cultural and philosophical world into the Latin one. The first significant theologian to write in Latin was Tertullian, the son of a centurion, born in the north African trading city of Carthage. He has to be seen as much as a representative of the ebullient north African Christians as of western Christianity as a whole. Centurions were highly respected members of the Roman state, and Tertullian was well educated, able to speak both Greek and Latin. He may have trained and served as a lawyer until his conversion to Christianity, probably in the 190s when he was in his thirties, and, if so, he conforms to the stereotypes of his profession in his conservatism, his rigid approach to social issues and his ability to use uncompromising rhetoric with great emotional effect. There is something of Paul in the way that Tertullian castigates intellectuals and glories in paradox. How could one have answered his most famous statement, “The Son of God died; it must needs be believed because it is absurd. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible”? Like many Latin Christians, he taunted the Greek philosophers: “Wretched Aristotle who taught them [the heretics and philosophers] dialectic, that art of building up and demolishing . . . self-stultifying since it is ever handling questions but never settling them . . . what is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?”

He was, writes one scholar, “pre-eminently a theologian of revelation and an opponent of all
curiositas
beyond the church’s rule of faith.”
³
He had much more of the Stoic in him than the Platonist. So Tertullian helped to keep the western church outside the great debates over theology raging in the eastern empire. In general, western theologians were wary of the more sophisticated easterners’ readiness to accept that “Christian” insights might be embedded in Greek philosophy. On the other hand, his attempt to formulate his own theology led him to devise specific Latin terms for Greek concepts. One of these was the word
Trinitas.
(In “his” Trinity the divine
logos
exists in the mind of God from the beginning of time but is “shot out” at the moment when the cosmos begins.) Here are the first stirrings of a specifically western theology expressed in its own language rather than in translation from the Greek.

Although Tertullian was to argue that Christians posed no threat to the state, in his ethical writings he portrayed the world as essentially hostile to Christians. As a Christian one was unable ever to relax one’s guard. The threat of sexual temptation, in particular, was ever present, and Tertullian does not seem to have believed that sexual urges could be fully tamed until old age had exhausted them. (He argued that a church community should be run by the elderly as only they might have gone beyond temptation.) Tertullian contributed an abiding fear of woman as temptress to the western tradition, and his views became more rigid with age. Beset with the continuing “immorality” of those around him, he came to believe that God would have to continually update his message to mankind, and in his last years he joined the Montanists, who claimed to be in direct contact with God. He passes from the scene (his last known writings date from A.D. 212) and the date of his death is unknown but perhaps as late as 240.

One westerner deeply influenced by Tertullian was Jerome; in fact, much of what is known about Tertullian’s life comes from Jerome himself.
⁴
As has already become clear, Jerome (c. 345–420) seems to have been an isolated and troubled individual, tormented by his sexuality, vulnerable to any hint of personal betrayal (and vituperative in response) and obsessive about the necessity for asceticism. So he is hardly an attractive figure; yet his mastery of Latin (his native language, in which he wrote with great elegance), Greek and Hebrew and his meticulous knowledge of the scriptures gave him the reputation as the leading scholar of his day. His monument remains the Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, the Vulgate, which reigned as the official Latin translation of the Bible for the Roman Catholic Church until the 1960s. (Although the whole of the Vulgate is traditionally attributed to Jerome, it is probable that of the New Testament only the Gospels are his.)

Jerome was born, probably about 345, on the border of Dalmatia but was educated in Rome and baptized as a Christian there. Then he set out to the east, first staying in Antioch, where he was ordained a priest, and next retreating to the Syrian desert, where he was to spend several years. Here he was tortured by his sexual desire, but he also later recorded a terrible dream in which he was flogged for preferring Cicero to the scriptures. He was warned that if he ever read non-Christian writers again he would suffer worse torments. He seems to have resolved his guilt and continued his reading (or at least he continued to fill his writings with classical allusions). Naturally, while in the east he perfected his Greek, but, more unusually, he learned Hebrew (apparently, so he said, to be able to fight the Jews on their own ground). No Christian other than Origen had studied it in such depth, and Jerome’s knowledge served to distinguish him from his fellow theologians.

When he returned to Rome in the 380s, Jerome’s breadth of learning recommended him to Damasus, bishop of Rome, as a personal secretary, and it was Damasus who first suggested that he provide a proper translation into Latin of the Bible. The “Old Latin” versions, as they were known, dated from the second century; they were poorly translated and varied from one copy to the next. They urgently needed revision and correction. The task gave Jerome the purpose in life that he seems to have craved, and these next three years in Rome were the most emotionally settled of his life. He reached out to a group of ascetic women, who adopted him as a sort of father confessor. Emboldened by their respect, Jerome produced some of his most weighty letters, notable among them the somewhat oppressive but highly revealing Letter XXII to the young Eustochium on virginity. Yet Jerome could never be fully at peace with his fellow men. His aggressive asceticism and apparently baleful influence on so many leading women of the city created resentment among their class, and he compounded this by accusing his fellow priests of laxness and hypocrisy. His relationship with a wealthy ascetic, Paula, mother of Eustochium, aroused particular scorn, and so on Damasus’ death he was in effect driven from the city, the scandal intensifying when Paula left with him. Jerome was never to forgive the Roman clergy, that “senate of Pharisees,” for the rejection. For Jerome, Rome itself was indeed “the whore of Babylon” of the Book of Revelation.

Jerome and Paula eventually settled in Bethlehem, where Paula’s wealth was used to found two monasteries to support them and their followers. The new Latin version of the Gospels had now been completed and for the next twenty years Jerome worked on his translation of the Hebrew scriptures. At first this work aroused deep suspicion. The Greek Septuagint version had achieved a canonical status, and there was much unease over a rival version that might threaten its dominance. Augustine prophesied that there would be a break between east and west if the west abandoned the Septuagint, which Greek-speaking Christians believed to have been divinely inspired, for the Jewish original. It was only in the ninth century, in the great Bibles produced by Charlemagne, that Jerome’s version was fully accepted (and by that time the breach was in any case complete).

Translation seems to have been Jerome’s forte; he was notably less at ease with original and creative work. Many of his commentaries on the Old Testament are drawn almost entirely from earlier commentators (despite his abuse of Ambrose for doing the same). He was thoroughly caught out as late as 1941 when the discovery in the Egyptian desert of a voluminous five-book commentary on the prophet Zachariah by Didymus the Blind showed how heavily Jerome had relied on Didymus in his own commentary on the prophet. It has to be remembered that before the invention of printing there were very few copies of most works available and the opportunities for successful plagiarism were widespread. Also, to be fair to Jerome, there are many occasions in these commentaries when he does record his sources. Perhaps Jerome’s greatest inspiration came from Origen, whose works were available in manuscript in nearby Caesarea, where Origen had spent his last years. Origen had been the first Christian to compare systematically Hebrew versions of the scriptures with the Septuagint and was a model for Jerome on those grounds alone, but he had also written major commentaries on many of the books of the Old and New Testaments, adaptations of which appear in Jerome’s own work. It has been shown, for instance, that in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, which can be compared to parts of Origen’s own commentary, Jerome passed off Origen’s ideas as his own, even to the extent of unwittingly repeating under his own name some of Origen’s errors!

Yet it was also the legacy of Origen which exposed Jerome at his weakest. The sheer creativity and originality of Origen had left him vulnerable to critics, and by the end of the fourth century these were gathering. Epiphanius, the ardently orthodox bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, included Origen as one of a long list of heretics he had compiled, on the grounds that Origen had been an inspiration for Arius. An intransigent and forceful man, Epiphanius then began to approach scholars such as Jerome to win them over to his rigid brand of orthodoxy. He sent a group of monks to Bethlehem, and, for reasons that have never fully been understood, they were able to persuade Jerome to abandon his mentor. Perhaps the reason lies in Jerome’s fundamental lack of selfconfidence, which made him particularly vulnerable to pressures of this kind. Others, however, were not to be so easily bullied, among them the bishop of nearby Jerusalem, John, and Rufinus, a friend of Jerome’s from his school days who had settled in a monastery on the slopes of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and had been responsible for the Latin translation of works of several of the great Greek theologians, among them the Cappadocian Fathers. Rufinus now set about a translation of Origen’s major work,
On the First Principles
(
De Principiis
in Rufinus’ Latin version, which is the only one to survive). He was aware that in Rome, where the Latin version would be read, Origen was already being treated with suspicion, so he prefaced his translation with the comment that he believed that Origen had been unfairly represented by his critics. He also proclaimed that he was only following in the footsteps of a far greater scholar then himself, Jerome, the well-known enthusiast for Origen! Jerome was outraged, as he had some right to be (Rufinus knew of his change of heart), but his response, dispatched to Rome in a letter intended to be made public, was vituperative. Rufinus was branded as a heretic who had covered himself with infamy through translating such a heretical work as
De Principiis.
Jerome went on to create distorted versions of the translation so as to associate Rufinus with extreme views he had never expressed. Although Jerome later wrote a more moderate personal letter to Rufinus, it never reached him, and the damage was done—an old friendship had been rudely shattered. Rufinus retaliated by quoting passages of Jerome’s where he had borrowed from Origen without any acknowledgement. While things moved Jerome’s way when, as we have seen, in 400, Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, also branded Origen a heretic, Jerome’s inability to control his vindictiveness and his unashamed readiness to distort the writings of an opponent has lingered across the centuries.