The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (47 page)

It was, however, in this context, with imperial authority crumbling in the west, that the role of the bishops of Rome gradually expanded. One by one the ancient senatorial families of Rome had converted to Christianity; in the city we can see the shift in patronage from the old and now decaying ceremonial centre to the great new basilicas which were being built around it.
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If there is one figure who symbolizes the growing power and influence of Rome, it is Leo, one of only two popes to be termed “the Great.” Leo, who became bishop of Rome in 440 and reigned until his death in 461, is an outstanding figure, not only by virtue of his forceful personality but also for his determination to enforce his authority as heir of Peter over the other bishops of the west. He interpreted the Roman law of succession to suggest that he had even assumed the legal personality of Peter by virtue of the unbroken line of bishops of Rome since Peter’s time, an interpretation reflected in his confident dealings with bishops in Africa, Italy, Spain and Gaul. His sermons, like the man himself, are direct and lacking in rhetorical flourish, and they are supplemented by a growing number of decrees, on church government, the authority of bishops and the ordination of clergy. Heretics were dealt with firmly, a council of bishops in northern Italy issuing a further condemnation of Pelagianism. Shrewdly, Leo also tied his authority to the state by acting through Valentinian III (emperor of the west 425–55) in civil affairs. He asserted his own authority in the secular sphere in 452, when he personally led a delegation from Rome to confront Attila the Hun, whose armies were ravaging northern Italy. When Attila withdrew, possibly because of a lack of resources, Leo successfully took the credit. Three years later he had another coup when he persuaded the Vandal leader Gaiseric, who entered Rome unopposed, to deal leniently with the city.

As we have seen, Leo was also the first bishop of Rome to play a decisive part in the making of Christian doctrine. His
Tome,
a formulation of the two natures of Christ in one person, was adopted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. While Leo saw this as an acceptance of his primacy over the whole church, the eastern bishops claimed that they had accepted it because it represented what had already been agreed at earlier councils. The disagreement was but one stage in the long and complicated process by which east and west were separating from each other.

Leo’s ascendancy, however, was as much a reflection of his determination and personality as it was of Rome’s rise to preeminence. A century later, by contrast, Vigilius, bishop of Rome 537–55, was unable to resist the forceful Justinian. While the Chalcedonian formula had been accepted in the west, as it still is, controversy over the nature of Christ continued in the east. In order to gain support from Monophysites, Justinian decided to condemn their opponents, the Nestorians, by declaring the
Three Chapters,
texts in which Nestorian views had been expressed by Theodore of Mopsuestia and others, to be heretical. Justinian needed to have the support of the bishop of Rome. Vigilius had apparently promised the empress Theodora that he would favour Monophysitism in return for help in gaining the bishopric. Called on to honour his promise, Vigilius became aware that there was intense opposition in the west to any imperial attempt to revise or reverse the decisions of Chalcedon. He hesitated and in 545 was kidnapped on the orders of Justinian and eventually taken to Constantinople. Here, worn down by the emperor’s demands, he was persuaded to condemn the
Three Chapters
—to the outrage of the clergy in the west. Feelings ran so high that he was excommunicated by the African bishops. Eight years later, Vigilius refused to attend the sessions of the council of 553 in Constantinople, where the
Three Chapters
were formally condemned, on the grounds that there was no proper representation from the west, but a year later he came out in support of the rulings of the council. Further embarrassment resulted from the publication of his secret correspondence with Justinian over the issues. Finally released from Constantinople, Vigilius died on his return to Italy but was so unpopular in Rome that he was refused burial in St. Peter’s. Justinian’s own army in Italy then imposed a new bishop, Pelagius, on the city, creating such resentment that at first no other bishop could be found willing to consecrate him.
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It was in these years, perhaps inevitably given the developments described above, that the relationship between east and west began to disintegrate. There had been virtually no western representation at the Council of Constantinople—in fact the bishops of the Balkans had met in a synod of their own to condemn it. As a result of the weakness of Rome, the bishops of Milan declared themselves out of communion with the city and remained so for twenty years: in Aquileia the bishop set up a separate patriarchy. All this at a time when the cultural unity of the empire was breaking down, classical learning was fading, the main diet of scholars was made up of Christian rather than secular texts, and east and west were forgetting each other’s languages. Greek was virtually unknown in the west after 700, just at the point when Latin was being eclipsed by Greek in the court at Constantinople.
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The new world that was emerging in the west was symbolised by Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome 590–604, “the harbinger,” as Judith Herrin puts it, “of a purely Latin and clerical culture of the medieval west.”
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Gregory was the son of a Roman senator and had served as prefect of the city before he sold his vast properties and diverted the proceeds to the relief of the poor and the founding of monasteries. He himself spent several years as a monk, the vocation to which he always felt most drawn. Later he was sent by the bishop of Rome as an emissary to Constantinople, but, unlike Vigilius, he successfully avoided becoming caught up in the intrigues of the imperial court, and when he returned to Rome, as abbot of his monastery, he was uncompromised by his experience in the east (he had even managed to avoid learning Greek). He became pope (the term was now in use with specific reference to the bishop of Rome) in 590, but his was a decaying city. The great aqueducts that had supplied the city with water for centuries had been cut, many of the old senatorial families had left and large parts of the city were now deserted. Northern Italy was held by the Lombards. So while Gregory is remembered for his careful and charitable management of the papal estates around Rome (their produce being passed on to the poor), his temporal power did not extend much further. In the event, the mission he sent to effect a conversion of the Angles in Britain was a triumph. Despite his lack of power, Gregory showed no inhibitions in standing up to the emperors in Constantinople and insisting on the ancient privileges of his position.

Gregory was not an original thinker; he relied heavily on his forerunners in the western theological tradition—Augustine (and hence Paul), Ambrose and, in monastic affairs, Cassian. He distrusted secular learning, and for him the deadliest of the seven deadly sins was pride, by which he meant intellectual independence. “The wise,” he said, “should be advised to cease from their knowledge,” to be “wise in ignorance, wisely untaught.” The philosophers, he went on, were so concerned with finding the immediate causes of things that they were blind to the ultimate “cause,” which was the will of God.
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Gregory celebrated miracles, even telling how the bishop of Placentia had been able to quell a flood in the river Po by dropping a letter of command into its waters. By this time, however, when traditional philosophy had been long suppressed and with it the stabilizing force of reason, Gregory was expressing the conventional wisdoms of his time. These views should not overshadow his major achievements as a moral teacher. His writings are free of the obsession with heresy that make those of many of his predecessors so dispiriting—he preferred instead to stress good example—and he thought deeply and with much sensitivity about how bishops and pastors could exercise their authority. The ideal priest, said Gregory, must be “intimately close to each person through compassion, and yet to hover above all through contemplation.” He was a champion of the rule of St. Benedict (c. 540), that balance of austerity and humanity that in itself drew on the works of Cassian and the rule of Basil of Caesarea, and he extolled those church leaders, such as Benedict, whom he felt provided a model for Christian living. He resisted extremes. When a fellow bishop threw out all the statues in his church on the grounds that they encouraged idolatry, Gregory reproached him with the shrewd advice that “to adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another.”
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(A story that he threw the surviving pagan statues in Rome into the Tiber appears to have been a later fabrication.) His method of converting the Angles was also sensitive when compared with the more robust methods of many of his fellow Christians. Despite being a devotee of Augustine, Gregory moved to moderate the more extreme consequences of Augustinian theology. He refused to believe that God was so harsh that a sinner who died by accident before he could complete a penance set for his sins would necessarily end up in hell, and it is in Gregory that one finds an early definition of purgatory, a halfway house where sins are purified before the sinner progresses to heaven. Those left on earth are given the role of interceding with God to speed the process, and, unlike Augustine, Gregory accepts that their good works and pious practices are of value to God. He stressed the importance of music in worship, and he is the Gregory of the Gregorian chant (although a direct link to plainsong has never been proved). He put aside the problem of evil as an unfathomable mystery, although he argued that suffering does act to test the faith of believers. Nor was he as obsessed with sexuality as many others. If clergy found it difficult to remain celibate, then they should be free to marry. It was just this kind of leadership, humane but unquestioned in its moral authority, which was needed to establish the papacy’s independence of the east, and Gregory is usually seen as the founder of the medieval papacy. His legacy endured and the office gained in stature. In 800 the emperor Charlemagne travelled to Rome to receive coronation at the hands of a successor of Gregory’s, Pope Leo III.

The provinces of north Africa had been reconquered by Justinian in the 530s and restored to orthodox Christianity, but in the seventh century they were overrun by the Arabs. For good or ill, Rome lost those provinces of the west that had provided the most effective challenge to her authority, with the result that, in the words of Robert Markus, “Rome’s world became radically simplified; and the Roman see emerged as the single, isolated, religious centre of the barbarian west.”
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The history of western Christianity was rewritten so successfully to reflect this fact that many western Christians are hardly aware of the predominently Greek nature of the early church. In fact, it is still possible to read of the eastern churches “breaking away” from Catholicism. Though the story is necessarily complicated, it seems rather to have been one of “the final detachment of the papacy from Byzantine political allegiance and the creation of a new western empire” in the eighth century.
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A story survives of one Fursey, an Irish ascetic of the seventh century, who dreamed that he had died and was facing the last judgment. He was assailed by a mass of demons, who pointed out that many of his deeds, apparently good in themselves, were tainted because they had not sprung from love alone. There would be no justice, the demons told him, if God was to accept him in paradise. They even doubted, they told him, that God was as fully aware of his shortcomings as they were! To remind him of his peril, as he passed through the flames of hell, the required route to reach heaven, the body of a burning sinner, to whom on earth he had given a light penance in return for a gift of clothing, brushed against him, leaving a scar on his face. Although with the help of protecting angels Fursey did make it to heaven, the scar remained on his cheek when he awoke from his dream, and every time he recounted his terrifying experience he was seen to break out into sweat.
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Ever since Paul described the last judgment as “a day of anger,” anxiety had formed a significant part of the Christian experience; reading the writings of the western Church Fathers, it is easy to see why this was so sustained. They expressed intense anxiety over authority, over sex, over the punitive powers of their God. No one who follows Augustine can be sure of salvation. What has been particularly important has been the conceptualisation, following Plato, of the human
psyche
as at continual war with itself. We are caught as individuals in a cosmic drama, and one can never relax in case the demons take hold. (There is an interesting analogy here with Freud, who saw the unconscious ready to ambush our rational behaviour at any moment.) It deserves repeating that this is only one possible way of conceptualising the
psyche;
others, following Aristotle, would prefer to stress its potential for harmonious
eudaimonia.
However, in medieval Christianity preoccupation with internal battles and the inherent sinfulness of humankind took an ever more powerful hold. As so often, art reflects the process. As Neil MacGregor has put it in his thoughtful study of Christian art,
Seeing Salvation,
“as the number and scale of our wrong doings grow, so, necessarily do his [Christ’s] sufferings.”
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The rare depictions of crucifixion in the fifth century show no sign of Christ’s humiliation and suffering— perhaps Christians still found it difficult to accept the degradation of crucifixion. The words “who was crucified for us” were added to the litany for the first time in the 470s in Antioch.
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By 1300 his suffering is shown in prurient detail. Christ’s agony on the cross makes sense only in the context of man’s sinfulness; if Christ brings salvation, then it follows that humanity is in need of it and the nature of man is defined accordingly. Thus the profound rupture with the classical world’s conceptions of “man.” And the rupture was firmly associated with the attack on rationalism, as can be seen in Augustine’s assertion that man’s power to think rationally had been corrupted forever by Adam’s sin.