The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (59 page)

16. In the “Epilogue” to B. Pearson, ed.,
The Future of Early Christianity:
Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester
(Minneapolis, 1991), p. 472. See H. Koester,
Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development
(London, 1999), for his views on the importance of integrating what survives of the “apocryphal” Gospels with the canonical Gospels.

17. See Metzger and Coogan, eds.,
The Oxford Companion to the Bible,
p. 103. The Montanists are covered in Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 97–108. It was Hippolytus of Rome, a contemporary of Tertullian, who put forward the idea that direct prophecy had ceased with John. The Book of Revelation was and remains part of the New Testament to this day. D. H. Lawrence, however, saw it as “the Judias Iscariot of the New Testament,” and it remains an uneasy amalgam of extravagant terminology and wild imagery. It has had its uses within the church, however. Its description of the heavenly Jerusalem as a city of precious stones allowed it to be used to support the opulence of church building in the fourth century; see further p. 207. More positively, Richard Bauckham has commented that, despite modern readers finding it “baffling and impenetrable . . . yet this is a book that in all centuries has inspired the martyrs, nourished the imagination of visionaries, artists, and hymn writers, resourced prophetic critiques of oppression and corruption in state and church, sustained hope and resistance in the most hopeless situations.” From the introduction to “Revelation” in J. Barton and J. Muddiman, eds.,
The Oxford Bible Commentary
(Oxford, 2001), p. 1287.

Direct revelations, especially through the Virgin Mary, continue to be reported and, in some cases (Lourdes and Fatima), accepted as valid by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul announced in 2000 that the famous third secret of Fatima, for long known only to the popes, had in fact contained a warning from the Virgin Mary of his attempted assassination. The problem here is how to recognize the continuing activities of the Holy Spirit. Is it conceptually possible for the Holy Spirit to make a revelation that conflicts with Christian orthodoxy, or is the validity of any revelation to be recognized because it reinforces orthodoxy?

18. Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the shrewdest commentators on the evolution of Christian doctrine, surveys the different meanings of salvation in early Christianity in
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 141–55.

19. The quotation from Irenaeus is taken from H. Bettenson, ed.,
Documents
of the Christian Church
(Oxford, 1943), p. 99. That of Tertullian, from his
Praescriptio Haereticorum
19:2, is quoted in J. Rives,
Religion and Authority in
Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
(Oxford, 1995), p. 278. Rives has much of importance to say about church authority in that chapter. The notion of apostolic succession was crucial for the church as it gave a means by which the authority of the church could be passed on from bishop to bishop. For a full discussion, see Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 108–20.

20. Cyprian,
De Unitate
17.428. An excellent discussion of Cyprian’s views on authority can be found in Rives,
Religion and Authority,
pp. 285–307, from which the quotation and material for the next paragraph is drawn. It is interesting to note that the need to impose authority in terms comprehensible to north African Christians threatened to eclipse the reality of a Jesus executed as a rebel
against
Roman authority.

21. Jaroslav Pelikan sums up the approach of Eusebius as follows: “According to the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, orthodox Christian doctrine did not really have a history, having been true eternally and taught primitively; only heresy has a history, having arisen at particular times and through the innovation of particular teachers” (in
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 7–8). Eusebius’ view that orthodoxy was established early in church history and simply had to defend itself against the onslaughts of heretics has been particularly influential in the Roman Catholic tradition and still conditions many histories of the Church. However, as Pelikan shows throughout his study, it was diversity rather than uniformity that marked the early development of Christian doctrine.

22. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, deals with conversion and John’s prayers at Ephesus; see p. 40 for his discussion of the demons.

23. Ibid., p. 112. Exorcism has not wholly died out within Christianity in that both the Catholic and the Anglican Churches still have rites of exorcism and even specially appointed exorcists to drive out “demons.”

24. Quoted ibid., p. 37. Celsus contrasted pagans, who could be accepted into their mysteries if they had “pure hands and wise tongues,” with Christians, for whom sinfulness seemed to be a prerequisite for entry to theirs.

25. See L. Alexander, “Paul and the Hellenistic Schools: The Evidence of Galen,” in Troels Engbury-Pedersen, ed.,
Paul in His Hellenistic Context
(Edinburgh, 1994). The third-century theologian Origen taught that the “simpleminded” Christians should be told that the resurrection was a literal resurrection of Jesus’ body (while he and other more sophisticated Christians could see it in a more symbolic sense); see chap. 8, note 19 above.

26. Bettenson,
Documents of the Christian Church,
p. 9, for the quote from Clement. The quote from Augustine comes from
De Doctrina Christiana
2:144.

27. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, p. 32.

28. C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 14. There is a vast amount of material on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. Did Platonism corrupt an original “pure” Christianity or was it the “nurse” without which it would not have survived as a respectable participant in a highly competitive intellectual world? No easy answers are to be found in what has been a celebrated debate. A useful overview, with reading list, can be found in A. Le Boullec, “Hellenism and Christianity,” in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds.,
Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000).

29. Definitions of these “heresies” and alternative interpretations can be found in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian
Church,
3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997). The Sabellians used the sun as an analogy. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the equivalent of the heat, light and what Sabellius called “the astrological energy” of the sun, in other words different manifestations of the same essence.

30. See the article “Soul” in A. D. Fitzgerald, ed.,
Augustine Through the Ages
(Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 1999), and Kallistos Ware, “The Soul in Greek Christianity,” in M. James and C. Crabbe, eds., From Soul to Self (London and New York, 1999), p. 53. Thomas Aquinas was to talk of the “ensouled body,” deliberately turning his back on Plato’s conception (see chap. 20 of this book). The mind/body debate so beloved of philosophers is tied in with all this.

31. An interesting example is the Song of Solomon, which most would read at face value and without qualms as a mildly erotic love poem. However, the Church Fathers were deeply troubled by any hint of sexuality, and Origen interpreted the Song as an allegory of God’s relations with the individual soul, an approach that removed the sexual “danger” implicit in a straightforward reading of it. The “allegorical” approach to biblical interpretation taken by Origen was followed by Jerome and Augustine.

32. The first quotation is taken from Origen’s
Contra Celsum
4:99. The second is from J. Clark Smith,
The Ancient Wisdom of Origen
(London and Toronto, 1992), p. 52. There is an echo here of Homer’s depiction of the gods returning all to how it used to be; see chap. 2, note 7 above.

33. From Pindar,
Nemean Ode 6,
trans. R. Buxton.

34. See the individual entries for the early popes in J. Kelly,
The Oxford
Dictionary of the Popes
(Oxford, 1986). A good study of the psychology and impact of martyrdom is to be found in R. Lane Fox,
Pagans and Christians
(London, 1986), chap. 9. I wonder whether an analogy might be made between the memory of martyrdoms and the memory of the Holocaust, both of which seem to have intensified rather than diminished through time.

35. R. Stark, in his
The Rise of Christianity
(Princeton, 1996), makes some calculations in chap. 1. His estimate of the Christian population for A.D. 274 is 4.2 percent for the whole empire, and he compares this with evidence from Egypt, a more heavily Christianized part of the empire, that suggests that just over 10 percent of the population there were Christian by this date. Whether these figures mean anything is open to doubt. There was no clear definition of what it meant to be a Christian in the third century, and, as has been seen, many religious movements included Christ among their spiritual leaders, so it is hard to see how any valid calculations could be made. Again, one has only to read of the mass rejection of their faith by Christians at times of persecution in north Africa to realize how fluid a conception “being a Christian” was. See also K. Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implication,”
Journal of Early Christian Studies
6 (1998): 185–226.

36. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, p. 40. A useful account of the growth of Christianity in Asia Minor in this period is to be found in Mitchell’s study
Anatolia,
vol. 2, chaps. 16 (pp. 37–42) and 17. Mitchell suggests that Phrygia was perhaps the most highly Christianized part of the empire by 300, but he emphasizes that while some communities in the province were heavily Christian, others were still largely pagan. As he puts it, a map of cities highlighting those that were Christian would “resemble an irregular patchwork quilt, not a simple monochrome blanket” (p. 63).

11

1. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to
Eighth Centuries
(New Haven and London, 1997), p. 130. See the new edition of
Eusebius: Life of Constantine,
trans. with introduction and commentary by A. Cameron and S. Hall (Oxford, 1999), and pp. 27–48 of the editors’ introduction in particular for an assessment of the work in literary terms.

2. H. A. Drake, “Constantine and Consensus,”
Church History
64 (1995): 7. Drake has now expanded his argument in
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics
of Intolerance
(Baltimore and London, 2000).

3. For a survey of Constantine’s life, see H. Pohlsander,
Constantine the
Emperor
(London, 1997); the chapters on Constantine in A. Cameron,
The Later
Roman Empire
(London, 1993); and D. Bowder,
The Age of Constantine and Julian
(London, 1978).

4. S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), p. 108.

5. Ibid., pp. 106–15, for Constantine’s definition of his own legitimacy.

6. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine,
1:28–32.

7. Ibid., 1:27. See J. W. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman
Religion
(Oxford, 1979), pp. 278–80, for comment.

8. H. A. Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
(Baltimore and London, 2000).

9. The decree is given in full in N. Lewis and M. Reinhold,
Roman
Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire
(New York, 1995), pp. 602–4, from which this translation is taken. Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops,
p. 195, stresses the importance of the edict in proclaiming freedom of worship, and on p. 249 he quotes the pagan orator Themistius (second half of the fourth century) addressing the emperor Valens as follows:

The law of God and your law remains unchanged for ever—that the mind of each and every man should be free to follow the way of worship which it thinks [to be best]. This is a law against which no confiscation, no crucifixion, no death at the stake has ever availed; you may hale and kill the body, if so be that this comes to pass; but the mind will escape you, taking with it freedom of thought and the right of the law as it goes, even if it is subject to force in the language used by the tongue.

10. For the arch, see Bowder,
The Age of Constantine and Julian,
pp. 24–28, and A. Claridge,
Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide
(Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 272–76.

11. Liebeschuetz,
Continuity and Change,
pp. 283–84.

12. P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990), p. 125. There is also the prayer of St. Francis: “Praise be to you, oh God my Lord, and to all your creatures, and above all to their great brother the sun, who brings the day and illumines with his light; and he is beautiful and brilliantly radiant; he is the symbol of you, oh Lord.”

13. Liebeschuetz,
Continuity and Change,
p. 300. In
Life of Constantine
2:48, Eusebius quotes a decree that Constantine sent out to the eastern provinces which, in its insistence on the natural order of things, suggests a Stoic influence. It begins:

Everything embraced by the sovereign laws of nature provides everybody with sufficient evidence of the providence and thoughtfulness of the divine ordering; nor is there any doubt among those whose intellect approaches that topic by a correct scientific method, that accurate apprehension by a healthy mind and by sight itself rise in a single impulse of true virtue to the true knowledge of God.

Compare chap. 9, note 16, above.

14. Quoted in M. Beard, J. North and S. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, 1998), vol. 1, p. 367.

15. Ibid., p. 370.

16. Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops,
p. 230, makes this important point. For the elimination of the Donatists, see chap. 18.

17. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
3:4. The quotation from Constantine’s address is from Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops,
p. 4. One dispute between rival bishops in Ancyra in Galatia was described (to a synod of bishops meeting in Africa in 343) as follows: