The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman: A summary

Okay, I've been reading but not reporting on The Closing of the Western Mind. This is the fourth book I've read this year covering the same periods of history from different perspectives. At times, I will be making comparisons, using the authors' names. James Hannam is God's Philosophers, Robin Lane Fox is Pagans & Christians, and Elaine Pagels is The Gnostic Gospels.

Introduction: Freeman's premise is that the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled in the 4th and 5th centuries A. D.. He uses the introduction to define "rational thought" cites the mathematical theorems, inductive reasoning, and questioning thought. He cites Galen for his professionalism as well as his expertise as a logician (Hannam points out that you would not have wanted to be treated by Galen, as some of his logical connections have not met the test of time). This tradition,w which includes Aristotle, is contrasted with Plato's reliance on Forms, so that theory reigned over observation.

Chapter One: Freeman opens with a picture of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-74) holding a text from Paul, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise," which he calls the opening shot in the enduring war between Christianity and science. Behind Thomas are personifications of Philosophy, Grammar, Dialectic, and the queen of them all, Theology, the subjects of a medieval university curriculum. Freeman notes that they are clearly subordinate to the Word of God. Thomas' doctrine of the Trinity, his great achievement, is accessible not by reason but only through faith.

Freeman acknowledges the complex concept of faith, but says that by the 4th and 5th centuries a.d., faith had become acquiescence in the dogma of the orthodox Church. This dogma was set between the time of Constantine's accession to emperor and the end of the fifth century, by which time that orthodox creed had been pretty much set and insisted on, through the processes that Pagels describes in much detail in TGG. This dogma overrode reason, insisting that all knowledge comes from God and is revealed by Him, and suppressing any form of independent scientific thinking. Christianity thus actively challenged a well-established and sophisticated tradition of scientific thinking.

Hannam would not have considered the Greeks as having reached the point of scientific thinking, although he describes their contributions as "natural philosophers". He doesn't consider the scientific method established until the concepts of recording the results of manipulations and repeating these experiments to validate data appear.

Freeman is now going to go back to the Greeks to establish his hypothesis, and work his way forward in history, overlapping in great part both with Fox and Hannam.

Chapter 2: Homer distinguishes rational thought in the Oddysey, the mental landscape of the 8th century B. C.. Freeman notes the role of cultic rites and festivals in maintaining Greek culture during a period of physical expansion, material covered in great detail by Fox as well. The methods which the Greeks developed to mediate internal political conflicts by the 5th century resulted in the intellectual concept that forces tended to good order, to "eunomie", and if the city followed harmony, perhaps the natural world, the universe does as well, and if that order can be observed and determined, predictions could be made from empirical observations. Speculation began to arise about the nature of the universe and its workings. Debate arose about these and, in Freeman's opinion, gave rise to scientific thought (unlike Hannam--see above).

These debates led to the consideration of the process of reasoning and the establishment of logic, axioms, theorems, and syllogisms in deductive argument. Although the natural world is not as clear-cut as math and logic, the Greeks assumed there was an underlying order to things--it was not all the whim of the gods. This led to impressive achievement in astronomy especially.

Aristotle (c. 384-322 B. C.) probed into every area of intellectual activity. His M. O. was to master what had been said on any subject, criticize ideas he found inadequate, and identifying what questions needed to be answered. Current knowledge was provisional and cumulative over time. Freeman is especially impressed by the way the Greeks argued with each other, each not only building on earlier observations but seeking to outdo each other. Whereas other cultures established authority by striving to build upon prior writers, the Greeks valued the novel and different, rather than appealing to prior authority. Freeman sees the concept of science as equally concerned with proving things false as proving them true as one of the Greeks' great achievements.

When the Greeks wrote about any of these areas of systematic inquiry, they called their text "logos", which came to take on the meaning of "reasoned thought". This was contrasted with "muthos" or myth, where reason plays no part, and no conflict arose between the two. "One should not search for any form of absolute truth, in the sense of a belief whose certainty could be justified, in 'muthoi.' Similarly, one should not use the word 'logos' of truths that could not be defended by reasoned argument."

Freeman does accept that there were major difficulties in gathering empirical evidence, and that the cultural context led to the interpretation of the observations (with negative results for women and slaves).

Chapter 3: starts with an exploration of the power of rhetoric to both motivate men to do good and also to inflame by emotion in 6th century B. C. Greek society. Aristotle listed the components of a good speech, using "logos" to describe the speech itself: the character of the speaker, the disposition of the listeners, and those in the logos itself, its demonstrating.

This leads into an exploration of the philosophy of Plato, a reaction to his teacher Socrates' death due to the emotional and ephemeral impulses of the masses, the commission of evil in the execution of a "good" man. Plato's theory of ideal Forms was influenced by Pythagoras. Plato believed the human soul was immortal and reincarnated upon death. He conceptualized the soul as split into 3 parts, a reasoning part, a sensual part based on desire, and a third part based on "spirit" (and we thought Freud invented this!), with reasoning by far the most important. The Forms are so significant that observations of the actual world should be disregarded if they were in conflict with the Forms.

Freeman sees this as a direct attack on the mainstream scientific tradition of Greek thought and its reliance on empirical observation. Platonic thought assumes the material world is not the true home of the soul and that there is a deep gulf between the world of the senses and that of the Forms. Any God in this philosophy would be an awesome and remote one.

In contrast, Aristotle tried to create an ethical system that was based in everyday world of human existence. Only the free, mature male was capable of thinking rationally. Virtue occurs when the human lives a self-realized life. Goodness is determined through training and discrimination, not by emotion. This moral code must always be able to adapt to the demands of a specific situation--reason is always the final arbiter.

Chapter 4: Freeman really does NOT like Alexander the Great. REally! "The most significant political development in the Mediterranean world between 350 B. C. and 100 A. D. was the spread of monarchical government." The Greek city states were too small to control an area with stability, and Philip of Macedonia conquered most of Greece. Since his goal was Asia Minor, he set up an alliance of the cities that recognized him as their leader, a situation that actually benefitted them financially.

But when Alexander succeeded upon his father's assassination, he imposed a brutal rule upon the Greek cities, stripping them of manpower for his campaigns in the East. "Brilliant though his victories were, they achieved little more than the dismantling and rendering into chaos of an empire that had successfully maintained its stability and multicultural identity for 200 years." All Alexander was interested in was conquest; he had no interest in administration and did nothing to replace the power vacuum he created. His autocratic disposition relished the Persian model of kingship, and this alienated his army commanders.

After his death and 20 years of fighting, three of his commanders split the territories and did all the work of setting up workable societies. The Ptolemies took over Egypt, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Antigonids in Macedonia. They had no legitimacy except conquest and found they had to emphasize their personal power as king and keep large standing armies--which set up the relationship between monarchy and war that would underpin Roman imperial rule. For the first time, the possibility that the king might be divine was accepted, or at least he had a special relationship with a god, and the arts were used as propaganda to represent the ruler.

Alexander had outraged the Greeks with his elevation of himself to monarch and to godhead, bringing irrationality and absolutism to the core of government. His model of absolutism represented a threat to Greek intellectual life. That it survived was due to Alexander's successors. They used patronage as a means of status and maintaining the support of their subjects, shown through festivals and building projects, and the result was the preservation of Greek culture as seen in such projects as the Library of Alexandria and the stoa of Pergamum.

Even as the Greeks adjusted to being a conquered people, their culture was being spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and new developments in math, geography, literature, and philosophy started to emerge.

Chapter 5: How Rome absorbed Greek culture and ruled the world.

War was integral to Rome's system of government. "The secret of Rome's resilience lay in a psychology of aggression married to policies that were dedicated to increasing its fighting manpower. The emerging state was always prepared to give citizenship or, failing that, a favoured status to loyal communities. Their manpower became Rome's own..."

Rome adopted a foundation myth that linked it to Greece (Aeneas from Troy) and started by conquering the numerous Greek cities that had been built up on the Italian peninsula. Although some Greek tradition left the Romans cold (philosophy, science, math), it adopted rhetoric with enthusiasm, and its magistrates, elected by the citizen body, needed good public speaking as well as military prowess.

By the 1st century B. C., the republic was becoming unstable due to the growing size of the territory to be administered and the time commanders needed to spend abroad before returning to Rome. These commanders were already acting as de facto monarchs during their campaigns, and the Senate could neither rein them in nor make effective decisions as its size also increased.

Freeman then briefly describes the ascension of first, Julius Caesar as dictator and first consul, and then Octavian (Augustus), who gathered republican offices until he had all the power, while creating a stable system of government for the empire. Provincial government was administered by the conquered peoples through a client king, or became a province directly governed by Rome. "The secret of such successful administration in the long term lay in the creation of quiescent local elites that had their own interests in keeping good order."

The history of Judea under Roman rule is then described, starting under Herod the Great, and then devolving into a province under a prefect who ruled from a coastal city, coming to Jerusalem only at major festivals to maintain order, while the high priest was responsible for day-to-day responsibilities such as taxation.

Augustus was concerned to secure imperial rule for his successors, with his son-in-law Tiberius following him. Upon his death, his great-nephew Caligula succeeded, and then his uncle Claudius. The concept of imperial rule was never again challenged during the history of the empire.

Chapter 6: The Roman Empire at Its Height

The middle of the first century A.D. sees the reemergence of Greek philosophy, science and math in the second sophistic movement. Conservative but sophisticated, it integrated Rome's physical conquest with the renewed sense of Greek cultural superiority. This movement was sparked by Nero's visit to Greece in A. D. 66-67 where he participated in the traditional games and exhibitions. Later, Hadrian (117-138) was a strong supporter of all things Greek. In his 21 years of rule, he contributed over 200 benefactions on 130 cities across the empire, about a third of which were temples honoring Olympian or local gods.

Trajan, the next emperor, transformed the public perception of the emperor from "first citizen" to "parent", developing program to aid poor and abandoned children and giving certain protections to slaves.

Galen and Ptolemy did most of their work in this period. Freeman notes that a quote of Ptolemy reminds us that for the Greeks, spirituality and rationality, muthos and logos, could co-exist without conflict. "One of the most sophisticated of the Greek intellectual achievements was the distinction between the areas of knowledge in which certainty was possible and those that were not subject to rationalism."

The Romans also appreciated that their own myths were not dogma. While the fulfillment of public duties was an intrinsic part of being Roman, what the individual believed about the gods or myths was a private matter. They also assumed that other people's gods were as important a part of their society and so were prepared to tolerate other deities and beliefs, and take care not to offend them. Many of these local gods would end up being assimilated into the Roman pantheon. By this time, it was becoming increasingly common to see the divine world as having one supreme god, with the other gods being either manifestation or lesser divinities.

By the second century A. D. there was an emergence of many new cults, especially the mystery cults. Central to these is their flexibility, allowing the individual gods to be subsumed into an over-reaching deity. Aristotelians had their "unmoved mover", Platonists their "Good", Jews their God, and Stoics one supreme rational principle. Christianity had much in common with these cults, with its initiation rites, communal meals, and a priestly elite who had access to the cult's secrets and the absolute right to interpret them for others.

Roman religion did not in itself provide an ethical system--for that, you could turn to philosophy. Epicureanism and Stoicism both provided guidance to ways of living, but Platonism became the dominant school. Plato valued reason above emotion, a distaste for sensual pleasure which distracted the soul from perception of the Forms emanating from the "Good". During this period, the nature of the Good was developed into the sense of having an active intelligence, with the Forms being its thoughts.

A Jewish philosopher, Philo, used Plato to reinterpret Jewish theology. Using the concepts of the ultimate God (Good), Philo saw the Forms as coming into being at the same time as God but organized by Him through the divine power of reason (logos). The distinction between God's essence (ousia) and his power as manifested in the world was a crucial one.

In the second century, the Roman empire had reached the height of its maturity--relatively peaceful, able to defend itself, and its elites flourished in an atmosphere of comparative intellectual and spiritual freedom. There was a sophisticated legal system and clear parameters for enforcement. However, there was also a streak of cruelty in executions and exhibitions, and limits to tolerance, especially for those who active rejected the gods and proselytized. It also depended heavily upon slaves and had few effective controls over their treatment. Finally, there was continual low-level violence, banditry and the threat of overreaction by the authorities.

Chapter 7: Political Transformations in the 3rd Century

Because of the size of the Empire at this time, its borders were always vulnerable to attack. Over a period of 50 years in the third century, a series of attacks and border raids were fairly constant by both the German tribes (Goths, Alamanni, Franks) and the Sassanids in the East. Athens and Antioch were sacked. During this 50 years, Rome had 18 known emperors, with average reigns under 3 years. Building walls to protect cities replaced public projects and temples.

Finally in 284, an army officer declared himself the emperor Diocletian and ruled for 20 years. An effective general, he was an even more remarkable organizer and statesman. In order to allow the empire to respond to attack more quickly, he set up a Tetrarchy system, with each of the Tetrarchs having responsibility for protecting certain areas. A stabilization allowed border fortification to begin and the army divided into smaller, more flexible units. Diocletian divided the empire into smaller provinces with separate governors overseeing defense and tax collection. Land was assessed and tax rates set, and for the first time it was possible to have an imperial budget.

Emperors in this century increasing distanced themselves from their subjects. They were distant figureheads linked ever more closely to the gods. But Diocletian was very involved in the administration and he centralized the state so it could function more coherently and effectively. Citizenship, now a universal state except for slaves, was liked to common responsibility for the state, and those of questionable allegiance. A large community that refused to show any allegiance to the gods of the empire could no longer be tolerated. But Diocletian did not want to engage in a persecution that glorified martyrs, so he first confiscated Christian property. While many bishops ordered their congregations to give up property, believing the faith would survive without it, others, notably in North Africa, refused and condemned those that had, causing a major and enduring schism. As Diocletian's health deteriorated in 304, uprisings and fires were attributed to the Christians and new decrees called for the imprisonment of clergy until they sacrificed to the gods of state and then, the requirement of sacrifice under the penalty of death.

The persecution varied by province and governor. Galerius unleashed his hatred of Christians in the East, while Constantius used restraint in the West. But by 310, the persecution faltered. Galerius died of bowl cancer in 311. Christianity survived.

"Christianity and the new authoritarian empire of Diocletian were clearly incompatible, but there was an alternative to destructive and debilitating persecutions, and that was to absorb the religion within the authoritarian structure of the state, thus defusing it as a threat."

Chapter 8: Jesus

Before moving on to Constantine, Freeman takes 3 chapters to look at how Christianity developed and survived up to this point (307 A. D.). Recognizing the advances in scholarship in the last 35 years with the discover of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi documents, these have placed the historical Jesus firmly within a Jewish framework. However, a severe paucity on historical references to Jesus outside the New Testament means that interpretation of his role and mission still needs to be made with caution.

Within the New Testament, Paul's writing is the earliest but he doesn't talk about Jesus' life. All four Gospels were originally written in Greek, thus already at a remove from the Jewish perspective. Mark is the earliest and shortest, circa A. D. 70. Luke and Matthew follow within 20 years, drawing on Mark as well as another source lost to posterity. Matthew's was probably written in Antioch. The gospel of John was written about 100 A. D., with a very different agenda, for the first time presenting Jesus as divine.

The gospels are not meant to be history. Events have been shaped to provide a meaning and context for Jesus. The selection, placing, and development of the sayings vary from one Gospel to another, and each treats differently how Jesus was to be related to his Jewish background at a time when the Christian communities were spreading into the Gentile world.

Matthew emphasizes how Jesus fits into the Scriptures of the Old Testament, the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies, and was probably writing for a community that still saw itself as Jewish despite its devotion to Christ. He sees this Jewish community as replacing the Jewish people at large who have rejected Jesus. His gospel was later used to demonize the Jewish people as a whole and also to develop the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell.

Jesus' ministry was in Galilee around A.D. 27, starting with his baptism by John. This was ruled by Herod Antipas. Although prosperous, Galilee was remote from the more sophisticated centers of Judaism and its people were conscious of the Greek and Phoenician cultures directly surrounding them.

After covering the nature of Judaism at the time--the shared beliefs, the Law, the centrality of the Temple for worship (male Jews were required to visit the Temple 3 times a year for the major festivals)--Freeman discusses some of the various groups. The Pharisees had their own strict interpretations of the Law and, unlike many, believed in an afterlife and final resurrection of the bodies of the dead. They were not politically powerful but were respected. The Sadducees were conservative traditionalists and were well represented in the aristocratic priesthood.

The majority of Jews were poor, susceptible to illness, subject to taxation, and vulnerable-- all other peoples of the Near East and Mediterranean. Sometimes this led to unrest or revolt, but another path was spiritual withdrawal, as with the Essenes. They followed the Law in extreme fashion, holding property in common, encouraging celibacy, and believed the soul, but not the body, would have an afterlife. They were millenarians, waiting for some form of liberation.

The concept of Messiah (Christos) was used in general of one anointed by God for some special purpose. It was associated with King David's line, but another tradition expected a priest rather than a king. In neither case was a Messiah seen as divine--he was a human being who had been exalted by God.

Jesus cannot be identified as a single "category"--holy man, prophet, miracle worker, teacher, peasant leader--nearly every statement of his views in one Gospel seems to be qualified or even contradicted by another. But somehow he broke down social, political and religious barriers and attracted all sorts. However, unambiguous characteristics were: highly charismatic, never distanced himself from his followers or mode of life, chose special companions, showed a genius for parables connected to the everyday life of the small agricultural communities around him, effectively used miracles and exorcisms, and had great compassion. He knew the scriptures well. He was more accepted in the countryside than the towns. He taught that the coming of the Kingdom was immanent and set it within the context of moral renewal, revitalizing families and village communities along the lines of restored Mosaic principles.

The title Jesus used most often of himself was "Son of Man" and it is not clear in the gospels if he accepted Messiah status or if that was added by the authors. Two authorities on the Jewish roots of Christianity think it likely that the one who urged others to give up everything for the kingdom claimed for himself no title or position other than one who bore a message from God.

Jesus was bound to provoke reaction from the authorities: highly popular, underlying antagonism from the Pharisees and from the conservatives to, in particular, Jesus' teaching that sinners would be welcome in heaven even if they had not repented through making a sacrifice. He was vulnerable. It is unknown if this moved him from Galilee to Judea or if it was a planned step in his ministry. However, it was clearly the entry into the Temple overthrowing the tables of the moneylenders that brought him into direct and violent contact with the authorities, namely the high priest, whatever his motives for the action. This led directly to his execution.

Freeman notes it was remarkable that neither the Jewish nor Roman authorities followed it up with reprisals against Jesus' followers, supporting the view that Caiaphas kept his response to Jesus to the minimum. What he didn't foresee was the aftermath of the death for Jesus' followers. The destruction of their hopes and dreams and the ritual humiliation of the crucifixion was traumatic. (For nearly 400 years, Christians could not bring themselves to represent Jesus nailed to the cross.) The resurrection experiences reported in the Gospels and Letters have to be set in the context of this trauma and despair. The accounts are confused and contradictory. Mark ends with the open tomb, although there is a second century addition where Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene, then 2 of the disciples, then all 11 at table before being taken up to heaven. Matthew reports one appearance near the tomb and a single meeting with the 11 in Galilee. Luke's appearances all occur in or near Jerusalem and Jesus is not always immediately recognizable. John also has Mary Magdalene first and then two appearances in Jerusalem and one in Galilee. Paul reports Peter had the first appearance, then the 12 disciples, a meeting of 500, James, and then the Apostles. Paul stresses the difference between the perishable human body and the body in which Jesus appeared. All of this suggest distinct and unconnected apparitions rather than Jesus living in restored life.

In several accounts, the disciples initially went home to Galilee, but then returned to Jerusalem and began preaching their continued belief in Jesus and his promised return. They still saw themselves as Jewish and observed Jewish rituals, but began to reflect on how Jesus could be interpreted within that tradition. The idea that he could be divine was too much for any Jew to grasp, completely alien to any orthodox Jewish belief, but Jesus could be seen as one through whom God worked and who had been exalted by God through his death (Acts 2:22-24).

Freeman now returns to the question of the historical Jesus, who can be identified only with great difficulty. Despite the above summary of the most consensual developments of his life and teaching, nearly every point will still be challenged by one scholar or another. Jesus' charisma, the brutality of his death, and stories of a resurrection quickly passed into myth, and this was used by those committed to his memory in a variety of ways. (Myth as expression of a living truth that can function at different levels for different audiences.) No one can be sure where the boundary between the Gospel writers and Jesus' original words should be drawn. "However, the trend in recent scholarship toward relating Jesus to the tensions of first-century Galilee, in particular as a leader who appealed to the burdened peasant communities of the countryside and reinforced rather than threatened traditional Jewish values, has much to support it."

Chapter 9: Paul, "The Founder of Christianity"?

Paul formulated a meaning for Jesus' death and resurrection, was important in planting Christian communities in Asia Minor and Greece, and insisted on a dramatic break with traditional culture, both Jewish and Greco-Roman. For Paul, it wasn't Jesus' life that was relevant, but His death and resurrection.

The Apostle to the Gentiles was Jewish to the core, although he was from a community outside of Israel and wrote Greek fluently, as well as speaking Aramaic and probably Hebrew. Much of his terminology comes both from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Scriptures) and from the same sources as the Essenes, with similar theology.

His life is known from his letters and Acts. Not all letters attributed to him are accepted as such, but Romans, both Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Thessalonians 1, Philemon, and perhaps 2nd Thessalonians and Colossians. Both letters and Acts have limitations as biographical sources. The letters were written in response to particular situations, and info about Paul's life is provided only by chance. In these sources, however, Paul comes across as austere, having some unspecified physical ailment, extraordinarily tough and mentally resilient. He also is highly emotional as well as abrasive and sensitive to any threat to his assumed authority. He was unusual in not being married, as mainstream Judaism was hostile to celibacy. His life appears to have been constant conflict.

Although Paul could write, he often failed to win over audiences and may even have provoked their hostility by his manner. But this constant turmoil and challenge impelled him to define his beliefs in the depth that he did.

Paul was unsuccessful in preaching in Jerusalem and so when Barnabas brought him to Antioch, he began concentrating on the Gentile "god-fearers'. Many Jews accepted that there would be a place for righteous Gentiles in God's Kingdom, but Paul went beyond them in breaking the barrier between Jew and Gentile down, even implying at times that the Gentiles are now God's chosen people. Gradually, Paul developed a role for himself in ministry outside of Israel to the Gentiles, although his Jewish beliefs remained in his commitment to a single God, his hatred of idols, and his adherence to the scriptures. This also conveniently removed him from contact with those who had known Jesus in life. This was always an area of vulnerability for Paul, and he distanced himself from those who had known Jesus, presenting his teaching as having come by a direct revelation of Jesus Christ and not by what He had said and done on this earth. Paul makes a point of stressing that faith in Christ does not involve any kind of identification with Jesus in his life on earth but has validity only in his death and resurrection.

However, Jewish Christians outside Jerusalem were also outraged at his argument that circumcision and other ritual requirements had been superseded, and Gentiles often found a theology rooted in Judaism yet not part of it difficult to comprehend. Buffeted between the two, it is not surprising that "on a personal level this highly insecure man became acutely sensitive to threats to his leadership." He is afraid of competition and never asks his followers to evangelize themselves. Yet, it was Paul's insecurities and abrasive personality that acted as a spur to his highly individual theologies. He was not an intellectual, not familiar with Greek influences on thinking, and those trained in rhetorical logic were unimpressed by his preaching.

Paul's theology developed in response to specific challenges that impelled him to provide varied and often inconsistent responses, creating a new spiritual world while trying to stay within the conceptual mode of Judaism. Christ's crucifixion and death become the focus of a new life--all equal, Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female. Of course, then in 1 Corinthians he tells women to be silent at meetings and if they have questions, ask them of their husbands at home. Paul puts Christ in historical context starting with Adam, who let sin enter the world, but God acts in his compassion and is the Spirit that opposes sin through love of humanity.

Paul has problems with the Law. On the one hand, it provides a code of behavior, and yet it can not be perfect or else the salvation of Christ would be unnecessary. He is ambivalent in his letters, praising it and yet replacing it with Christ.

Most scholars believe Paul did not believe Jesus to be preexistent. He appears on earth as a man, then is exalted by God as a second Adam. Paul draws on the Jewish idea that a sacrifice atones for sin, with some allusions to Isaac, but Christ's sacrifice is so powerful that no further sacrifice is needed. Therefore Christians should not sacrifice. Exalted though Christ is, Paul does not make him part of the Godhead, but sees him as subject to God ( 1 Corinthians, 27-28). Christ is an intermediary between God and man.

Paul's teachings on faith are essential to his theology but difficult. Faith is essentially an emotional rather than rational state of being. It rescues from the power of darkness through death in Christ, achieves identification with Him and rises with Him. This personal, highly emotional commitment is new in antiquity, proposing that it is the inner orientation to God rather than ritual acts that is essential.

Many passages suggest that faith alone is sufficient for salvation. But in other passages, he stresses the importance of charity or love, leaving open the question as to whether good works are necessary to salvation. Perhaps because of his belief in an immanent second coming and urgency of adopting faith, Paul didn't consider that there would be time to make major behavioral changes. But when that didn't happen, Paul had to explain exactly how the faithful should live when Christ had superseded the Law, not so easy.

The other side of Paul's teaching, the fate of those without fate, has also been very influential. Again, he is inconsistent; at times he suggests that all might be saved and at others, that the faithless will be condemned ( judgment day is a day of anger, not joy). And that punishment will be for eternity (2 Thessalonians), even for those who have not heard of Christ.

The idea of being open to "faith", the longing to surrender oneself to another who can provide certainty, is an enduring part of the human psychology. However, this surrender raises concerns for the rational thinker. Plato condemns faith as a way to truth, for example, and the Greek rationalists found this way of thinking to be irrational and weak. Paul's response was to hit back with highly emotional rhetoric. So not only the Law has been superseded by Christ, but also the core of Greek intellectual achievement itself. So as Paul's writings came to be seen as authoritative, it became a mark of the committed Christian to reject rational thought, and even the evidence of empirical experience.

Elaborating his views on everyday conduct, Paul had two particular preoccupations. First was the rejection of idols and their worship, challenging again the Greco-Roman traditions. Thus he insisted that Christians remove statues of gods and goddesses from temples and public places. Although in his lifetime, they did not have the power to do this, by the fourth century his writings were used to justify the wholesale destruction of pagan art and architecture. However, from early times Christians were making symbols and painting representations, and eventually the adulation of relics, blurring the boundary between simple representation and worship of idols.

Secondly, Paul is preoccupied with the evils of sexuality. "Sex is always a danger." He stresses the value of celibacy, but tolerates marriage "better to marry than to burn." Although Judaism had always stressed continence, Paul's strictures and the central place given to sexual sins suggest that sex itself troubled him deeply, certainly in a way that is not evident in the teachings of Jesus. Before Paul sex was not seen to raise major ethical issues--the body as such was neutral. The idea of the body as a temple that can be desecrated by sexual activity was to be extraordinarily influential in Christianity.

It could be said that the stress on the fragmented personality that can never be at peace with itself until the final salvation through Christ is the most enduring of Paul's legacies. But the other legacy was his provision of an institutional framework for the church. By fixing on a comprehensible symbol, the death and resurrection, and proclaiming the huge and imminent rewards of Christian faith (and the terrible consequences of rejection), Paul created a focus for community worship. When the second coming did not materialize, this had to be sustained as an institution. While there is no evidence that any of the communities which Paul founded actually survived as opposed to, for example, the many communities in Northern Africa, he did stress the importance of communal meals. Drawing from Judaism, the structure of presbyters and eventually a shepherd, a bishop, as the senior figure of a Christian community led to the creation of a distinct elite within the community and clear lines of authority.

Paul's influence has been enormous. He shaped Christianity through his rich and evocative language, but he was confined by his personal isolation, his acute insecurity about his authority, and his ambivalence about his Jewish roots. The difficult circumstances in which he wrote explain much of the incoherence and contradiction in his letters. "He seems to have failed to absorb, or at least express in his letters, any real awareness of Jesus as a human being, or to reflect his teachings, other than, significantly, the prohibition on divorce." He is the only major Christian theologian to have never read the Gospels. His theology was conditioned by his belief in the imminence of the second coming. Had he known it would be delayed, how might it have changed his preoccupations? "The paradox of Paul is that while he created a Christianity for the Greco-Roman world, he also confirmed or planted within Christian theology elements that would set it in conflict with Greco-Roman society and traditions, over sexuality, art, and philosophy."

Paul cannot have expected his writings to have lasted, as the second coming would have swept them into oblivion. But his writing were gathered into the eventual canon of the New Testament. With the destruction of the Temple in A. D. 70, Jewish Christianity began to wither. The future was to lie in the Gentile churches.

Chapter 10: The First Christian Communities

Freeman uses the incident in Acts where Paul and Barnabas were acclaimed as gods in Lystra to illustrate that in the Greco-Roman world, unlike the world of Judaism, human beings could appear to cross the boundary between human and divine. While the Apostles and Paul saw Jesus within the context of Judaism to be a human being exalted by God upon his death, as Christianity moved out into the Gentile world it was now possible to assume that he might always have been divine. The Gospel of John (circa 100 A. D.) should be viewed in this latter cultural context. In this gospel, unlike the synoptics, Jesus becomes divine (clearly separating him from the world of Judaism) and strongly associated with symbols of unity and care, the vine and its branches, the shepherd and his flock. John writes for theological effect and adapts the sequence of events accordingly. For example, the cleansing of the Temple, realistically put in the Synoptics just before his arrest, is moved to the beginning of Jesus' ministry, perhaps to symbolize Jesus' transcendence over traditional Jewish religious practice. John's Gospel is structured to highlight a number of signs in Jesus' ministry that proclaim his status as the Son of God to those who can recognize them, from the miracle at Cana to the appearance to Thomas.

John for the first time associated the Greek concept of "logos" (the force of reason--translated as "the Word") with the Sophia, the Wisdom from Scriptures, as present from the beginning and now equated with becoming human in Jesus, a concept never countenanced by Plato and other philosophers. This is the only place the Incarnation is mentioned in the New Testament. If Jesus is logos, present since creation, then he must be in some way divine. Some texts in the Gospel assert identity with the Father, others a more subordinate position. Jesus as the Son/logos has the purpose of linking men back to God and offering them salvation, a positive role rather than the angry day of judgment stressed by Paul. John also elevates the power and importance of the Holy Spirit when Jesus returns to the Father, creating the possibility of the concept of the Trinity, although that would not be developed for another 300 years.

However, making Jesus divine also had the consequence of demonizing the Jews as deicides. John introduces sayings where Jesus rejects the Jews and foresees their role as his killers. Another force contributing this rejection of Judaism was the problem of continuing to use the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, of a religion from which Christianity was increasingly separate. Thus the argument that the Jews were not worthy of their own sacred texts. In addition, building on Paul's letters, early church fathers argued that, circumcision being unnecessary in the new covenant, the circumcision of the Jews signified an inferior status, an idea that outraged the Jews for whom it was a mark of their commitment to God.

"The key to understanding the early Christian communities is their relative isolation and desperate search for a distinct identity within a world whose gods and culture Paul had told them they must despise." To survive in a culture they defined as evil, Christians had to be secretive. There is practically no record of public preaching after the Apostles and Paul. Indeed, there are few records of any kind to be found.

Any institution that distances itself from mainstream society has to create its own support systems. The earliest sacrament to take recognizable form was baptism, an initiation, typically taking place after 3 years of preparation. The Eucharist was celebrated, although the doctrine of transubstantiation did not emerge until the Middle Ages. Christians could only marry other Christians, and a strong social support evolved in the community. As Christianity grew, the pattern of providing care within the community was extended to the sick and destitute beyond the immediate community.

It was a result of the urgent need to define its boundaries and beliefs that Christians developed sophisticated notions and structures of authority. This was a revolutionary development in a world where a person could belong to numerous different cults with no difficulty or reprobation. It took a two-fold process in which a canon of sacred texts emerged alongside an institutional structure in which bishops held authority within their communities and, eventually, claimed the absolute right to define and interpret Christian doctrine. The idea that stories about God and his actions could be frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of "truth" was completely alien to the Greeks, contaminating their concepts of "muthoi" and "logoi", and there was some resistance to it from early Christians as well. By about 135 A. D. Christians were accepting that written texts had more authority than the oral traditions of the life of Jesus.

The development of the New Testament took considerable time--there were a large number of competing texts which were narrowed down through their conformity with the evolution of doctrine. There was a deliberate attempt to exclude certain voices from the early period of Christianity. But even so, there was considerable diversity and lack of coherence in the documents accepted into the canon, and it was difficult to use them as an authoritative source for doctrine. While almost all the texts of the NT were written to and for specific, often small, communities faced with particular challenges, they were now assumed to have universal significance and to provide an unrivalled source for doctrine in the gradual rejection of direct revelation. Christianity fragmented as it spread, because of the variety of scriptural and traditional sources, and perhaps for this reason, the search for authority became more intense with a stress on an institutional hierarchy, the apostolic succession (Iranaeus, 178-200 A. D.; Cyprian, 248-258 A. D.). Still, there were many arguments between bishops across communities--there was definitely no one unified Church.

Christians also accepted the continuing activity of God in the world in the form of miracles and portents effected through the Holy Spirit, although direct revelation was by now frowned on thanks to the Montanists (remember, direct revelation did not fit well within a strict authoritarian model). Early Christians did not disbelieve in pagan gods but considered them demons, and exorcisms were very common and important. However, this also opened the Church to criticism of relying on faith rather than reason and this was becoming a handicap. Christians familiar with Greek philosophy began to seek to merge the two, from about 125 through 225. As we saw, the concept of logos, reasoning power, became equated with Christ and Middle Platonism was reinterpreted in terms of the Christian theology. The concept of faith shifted from being a state of openness as recorded in the Gospels to one of being ready to accept what is authoritatively decreed by the church hierarchy. The readiness to do this without questioning becomes a virtue in itself. Reasoning is now reserved for a few. Plato also reinforces the separation of the soul and body and saw the natural world as inferior to the ideal world--doctrines that became strongly infused in Christianity. Origen was a prominent Platonist theologian who developed the concept of original sin, saw Christ as created by the Father, stressed the longing of man to reunite with God, and argued that all would ultimately be saved. For the second and fourth of these, he would be declared a heretic at the Nicene Council in 325. "As Christianity became as much a political as a religious movement, the fear that without eternal punishmnet there would be insufficient incentive for being good predominated."

The self-imposed isolation of Christians from the political and religious structure of Roman society was bound to evoke reaction. It made it easy to scapegoat them as enemies, but also their refusal to participate in civic cult activities marked them as unpatriotic and raised fears that the protection of the gods might be lost. Persecution was generally haphazard and depended on the individual initiative of authorities. Overall, even in the third century, Christians were between 2 and 10% of the population, were mostly urban, eastern, and Greek-speaking, outsiders although more and more were working within the system.

Chapter 11: Constantine and the Coming of the Christian State

It turns out that the story about Constantine that everybody "knows" is probably not true, because it is based on what Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, wrote in his Life of Constantine, in which Constantine was shaped into a Christian hero, equated with Moses. However, recent research indicates that there is no evidence, outside of Eusebius, that Constantine knew anything much about Christ or even the requirements of Christian living. His main concern was probably political, to co-opt the growing Christian community into supporting his imperial rule, but he also maintained his relationship with paganism. After a decisive defeat of a rival Caesar, Maxentius, Constantine announced it was due to the support he received from "the supreme deity". Within a few months, he had declared that Christianity should be tolerated, and within a year had started a program of patronage that included a massive building of churches. Since persecutions had not been successful, integrating a religion that already had a well-established structure of authority as a prop to the imperial regime had promise. But Constantine knew so little about Christianity that he immediately ran into difficulty. First, he associated Christ with victory in war, but Christ was not a god of war. A new concept of Christianity would have to be forged to sustain this link. Secondly, he could not break with the pagan cults since they still claimed the allegiance on most of his subjects, but Christianity emphatically rejected paganism. Finally, while Constantine wanted a church that would be subservient to him, he found one racked with disputes and power struggles.

Constantine and Licinius jointly issued a proclamation in Milan in 313 that henceforth Christianity and all other cults would be tolerated throughout the empire. This was the first proclamation of the right to freedom of worship.

Conventional pagan terminology ("the Divinity") and symbols (the sun) were also used by Christians to represent Christ, so Constantine was able to satisfy both Christians and pagans by presenting himself in these terms and thus effectively remaining neutral. However, he also supported Christianity by granting special favors to clergy, especially in granting exemption from holding civic office and taxation. He appears to be trying to tie the Christian communities into the service of the state. But he did not forsee the consequence--that is, determining WHICH Christian communities, many at each other's throats accusing each other of being heretics, to accept as official. In an attempt to have the North African churches referee themselves, he called two successive councils of bishops, one in Rome and one in Gaul. Eventually, he became irritated by the rigid position of the Donatists and withdrew his patronage from them, inadvertently defining in the remaining western Christian communities what would become the Roman Catholic Church.

Constantine's primary preoccupations remained military, and he consolidated his sole rule of the Roman empire in 326, taking over the eastern provinces in addition to his western empire. The eastern empire had a long and rich cultural history, still primarily Greek speaking, and much more heavily Christianized, and a tradition of intense debate over doctrine. The bishops were constantly attacking each other verbally and Constantine saw his political unity threatened by the Christian Greeks' endemic political and doctrinal disunity. Almost immediately, he was confronted by a major dispute between the bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, and presbyter named Arius. It concerned the central problem of the relationship between God the Father and Jesus Christ. Arius saw Jesus as distinct from God, supported by passages from the Gospels and early Christian tradition, and perhaps essentially different in nature. Earlier Church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen, had supported this position, and it was a very common position around the year 300. Jesus was divine, but he was a distinct creation of God the Father. In contrast, Alexander argued for a theory of Jesus the Son as divine and fully part of the Godhead from the beginning.

Constantine was perplexed and irritated by the virulent conflicts between Arius and Alexander, writing that these distinctions were "idle and trivial", that the two agreed in all major doctrines. But the controversy spread, and so Constantine called a council of bishops so that he could enforce an agreed definition of Christian doctrine which could then be backed by the state. This was the Council of Nicaea. In his opening speech, Constantive stressed the need for harmony and how it would please both God and their emperor. This council, although it started with a conciliatory creed, ended with a document which rejected Arian arguments, insisting that Jesus was identical with the Father, ""homoousios", although it had no basis in scripture and had rarely been used in theological discussion up to this point. It is suggested that an impatient Constantine simply forced the matter through, and there were political advantages to having Christ within the Godhead rather than a distinct figure outside it that was a figure of peace, a representative of opposition to the empire and was executed by a Roman governor. Christ played little part in Constantine's theology. In doctrinal terms, the formula had no precedent and there is evidence the bishops had to be pressured into accepting it, dependent as they now were on his patronage and support.

Although the Council of Nicaea now has a respected place in Christian history as the first ecumenical council and the first expression of the (orthodox) Niciene Creed, it was not taken seriously at the time, indeed not until a later council under a different emperor, the Council of Constantinople in 381. Essentially, the bishops signed the document, saluted the emperor, and went back to their congregations and went on teaching what they always had, generally a doctrine somewhat in between Arius and Alexander. Within 10 years, most of these bishops had been deposed, exiled, or otherwise disgraced.

Constantine himself realized his enforced creed did nothing to maintain the allegiance of the majority of the Greek-speaking Christian communities, who remained Arian. His agenda required that consensus be maintained, and he actually began to reconcile with the Arians. However, Arius died, although his doctrines remained.

Constantine did not show any interest in the message of the Gospels, but used Christianity as a means of bringing order to society. He described Christianity as "the Law", a regulated way of life under the auspices of a single god. He did make divorce more difficult, included infanticide in a law on murder, banned crucifixion and public branding, but in many other laws he maintained a traditional Roman brutality. There were few Christians in Constantine's administration and the army remained pagan. Constantine showed no interest in social equality but maintained traditional distinctions.

In 326 Constantine's first 20 years in power were celebrated, he completed a great basilica and other monuments in Rome, but he was looking to the East for a new, more central capital. He built the city of Constantinople, respecting the pagan goddesses protecting Byzantium with temples, but also a major forum and palace of his own. Christianity was not evident in the founding celebrations and ceremonies, but space was reserved for churches in the center of the city, but under names that were also acceptable to pagans (Holy Wisdom, Holy Peace, Holy Power).

In April 337, Constantine was dying and finally allowed himself to be baptized, finally discarding the imperial purple and dressing in the white of the new Christian. His impact on the empire was dramatic, his reassertion of the empire as a single political unity, allowing Christianity to consolidate itself within his empire without alienating Pagans. But by bringing Christianity so firmly under the control of the state, he was severing the traditional church from its roots. A whole new set of tensions--the nature of Christian authority and where it lay, the appropriate use of material wealth for Christians now the subject of state patronage, the basis on which doctrine rested--had been created and many have still not been resolved today.

One of the most important legacies was the creation of a relationship between Christianity and war, creating the problem of how to present Jesus, the man of peace, in this context. The response was to transform Him, most explicitly, into a man of war.

Chapter 12: Emperors and the Making of Christian Doctrine

The question, after Constantine, was whether the newly enriched and privileged Christian communities would settle happily under state power or whether they would unsettle it by continued dissension. Constantine's three surviving sons eliminated the other members of their family and divided the empire among them in 337. Constantine I was killed invading Constans' territory in 340. Constans was assassinated in a palace coup in 350, the leaders of whom were defeated by Constantius in 351, who now ruled the entire empire for the next 10 years until his death.

The immediate challenge for emperors was to bring some form of order to the Christian communities by establishing and, if necessary, imposing a doctrine that defined the natures of God and Jesus and the relationship between them. It was not only order; once tax exemptions were provided, eventually including exemptions for church lands, a definition of "Christian" became imperative. The issue was alive because Nicaea had solved nothing. Its declaration that Jesus was of the same substance as the father (homoousios) was easy to attack on the grounds that it went against the tradition of seeing Jesus as subordinate to his Father and it used terminology that was nowhere to be found in scripture, and was largely ignored. Yet given the variety of sources and influences on the making of doctrine as well as the personal rivalries entangled therein, accusations of heresy, deceit, and fraud flew across the empire. It was a mess and Freeman explains some of the sources of the mess in more detail.

Constantius was determined to find a workable formula. Working with small groups of eastern bishops, some possible creeds were hammered out that prepared to accept Jesus as divine but not "homoousios", substituting "homoios" (like) in its place. How Jesus came into being was declared a mystery. These broad creeds were hoped to be general enough that the majority of Christian communities would accept them, but that very factor led to spirited if not furious further debates. Nonetheless, Constantius eventually accepted the Fourth Creed of Sirmium in 359 as a point upon to seek consensus. He wanted to establish it at two councils, one in the western empire in 360 and one in the east later the same year. Things did not go well. The western bishops were highly suspicious of this "eastern" creed and fell back on the Nicene creed initially, but finally agreed. The eastern bishops then were persuaded not to be out of step with the West.

Constantius then called a joint council at the end of the year at Constantinople with delegations from the two earlier councils, at which he pushed through the Fourth Creed and made it an imperial edict. However, when Constantius died unexpectedly in 361, his cousin Julian became emperor. Julian knew Christianity well, had been brought up Christian, but was dismayed at the vicious infighting he saw around him. Once he buried Constantius, Julian adopted "paganism", removed the clergies' exemptions, and were forbidden to teach grammar or rhetoric, as well as insisting that every man could practice his own belief without hindrance.

Julian was a philosopher emperor. He challenged what he saw as the irrational nature of Christian belief, using his knowledge of scriptures to support his writings. Only John of the Gospels accepts the divinity of Christ, e.g., and the prophecies in the Old Testament applied to Christ are based on misinterpretations of the texts. Why did God create Eve if she were going to thwart his plans for creation? and much more. However, Julian was killed during a battle in Persia after only 18 months in office. Several army officers served as emperor over the next 15 years, primarily concerned with defending the borders of the empire.

In 378, the Huns were on the move, driving the Goths before them and a mass of refugees poured across the Danube. The Goths defeated one of the co-emperors, Valens, and the cream of the Roman army at Adrianople. Theodosius became co-emperor but had to settle for permitting the Goths to settle within the empire, ostensibly as allies but with no real allegiance to Rome.

All these emperors were Christian but generally were tolerant of all faiths. In the west, the monotheistic formula of equal divinity had always been more accepted than in the more philosophically sophisticated and Greek-speaking east. However, in the 350s an eastern bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, began to defend the Nicene formula. Athanasius was a fervent opponent of Arianism, enforced his authority with violence and intimidation, and was exiled by emperors at least 5 times and for 15 years of his 45 years as bishop. Jesus was part of the Godhead from all eternity but He (logos) was incarnated because humanity is sunk in sin and cannot be left to suffer without redemption. He created an elaborate distinction between the human body of Jesus, which appears to suffer on the cross, and the divine "logos" which is somehow within the human body but does not suffer.

Athanasius then attacked Arians with unscrupulous tactics, bringing a new level of intolerance into church politics. He said the Arians' use of scripture was inspired by the devil and quoting earlier theologians was a slander on them (even though their positions were closer to the Arians than Athanasius). Unfortunately, when his position became orthodox, it legitimized such intolerant invective. In order to justify the incarnation, Athanasius provided a definition of man as inherently sinful, in contrast to, for example, Origen 100 years earlier. Men were inherently disobedient and the cause of their own corruption, and things were getting worse. This was a major and enduring shift in perspective and contrasts strongly with the earlier optimism of Greek thinking.

As the debates raged on, sometimes resulting in broken heads, the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, finally came up with what ended up being accepted as orthodox. THere is one Godhead, homoousios, but with three distinct personalities, hypostaseis. They were familiar with Greek philosophy and may have drawn on the neo-Platonist Plotinus who proposed "the One", "nous" or Intellect, and the World-Soul in his metaphysical system. This also elevated the Holy Spirit into the Godhead--the earliest writing presenting the Holy Spirit as a distinct personality is in 350. Thus Greek philosophical terms were adapted and adopted to produce a solution allowing the Nicene Formula to be reasserted, one that was a compromise between Arianism and Sabelliannism. The Trinity stood between the monotheism of the Jews and the polytheism of the Greeks.

The doctrine of the Trinity was very difficult for many to accept. There is very little in scripture that can be used to support the final form of the idea. In addition to scriptures that seem to deny the thesis, the only reason for Jesus to have a distinct personality was his being begotten as the Son, but this denied that God created Jesus. When challenged, the Cappadocians fell back on claims of the ultimate mystery of these things. Emperor support was critical for this complex doctrine to be accepted, and when Theodosius became emperor, he announced that the Nicene faith would be the orthodoxy and all alternatives punished as heresies in 380. In the eastern empire, this meant that the majority of Christian communities stood to lose heavily under the new policy and much anger greeted Theodosius when he entered the city in late 380. Bishops were removed and properties confiscated and handed over to bishops who accepted the Nicene creed. After convening with these bishops, an edict was enforced which stated that these were the only orthodox Christians, all other Christians differing from it being named foolish madmen unable to call their communities churches.

This edict finally confirmed the emperor as the definer and enforcer of orthodoxy. In the future, when debates within the church began to threaten the stability of the empire, it would be the emperor who would intervene to establish the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. Orthodoxy was now established with tax exemptions for clergy as well as access to wealth and patronage. Theodosius, faced with threat from outside, used orthodoxy as a focus for loyalty to the empire and reinterpreting attacks from outside as the assault of evil on the true faith. This may explain the rise of Christian intolerance as essentially a defensive response to these threats. Still, an extraordinary diversity of Christian belief flourished in the fourth century and it was only gradually that orthodox bishops were able to impose their authority.

Now that the doctrine of the Trinity had been proclaimed, scripture had to be reinterpreted to defend it. Augustine of Hippo used an "allegorical" approach--when scripture appears to be in conflict with doctrine, it should not be taken literally but as allegorical of some other meaning. This culminated in the Council of Trent in 1545-63 where a Catholic must swear to accept Scripture as interpreted by the Holy Mother Church.

The transformation of Christ from the man of the Synoptic Gospels to the God of the Trinity was a difficult one, and was accompanied by the way He was represented. His representations in mosaics assumes the pose of the cult statued placed in pagan temples as well as that of the emperors. Another symbol of imperial power was the halo, representing the sun.

Finally, Paul was elevated to apostolic primacy over Peter and the other apostles, with Augusting and John Chrysostom paying much more attention to Paul's writings than to the Gospels, and a great basilica built and dedicated to him in 392. It is possible the concentration on authority shown by Paul in his letters met the needs of the imperial church more adequately than the Gospels, which show Jesus challenging the religious and imperial authorities of his day. His focus against idols, Greek philosophy and sexuality also led to increased attacks on these in the Christian mission to eliminate paganism.

Chapter 13: "Enriched by the Gifts of Matrons"
Bishops and Society in the Fourth Century

This chapter is all about how the bishops went from a very precarious position during Diocletian's rule, where they often lost property and even life, to becoming more and more entrenched politically and fiscally starting with Constantine. "The emperor's desire to bring the bishops into the fabric of the state involved...enormous patronage...to those bishops ready to accept the emperor's position on doctrine, and those who took advantage of it came to have access to vast wealth and social prestige." While some bishops lived extravagantly and others gave their wealth to the poor to reinforce their Christian authority, bishops were now men with a stake in good order and who increasingly took control when other social structures weakened. The association of the churches with wealth, conservatism and the traditional structures of society was to endure in the European Christianity well into the twentieth century.

The bishops had always been based in the cities. (Note: the derogatory term "pagan" has the connotation of one who lives in the country.) The capital city of each province became the seat of the archbishop who had authority over the other bishops in the province. The original idea of giving status to a bishopric because of its association with Jesus or the apostles fell prey to political considerations. Jerusalem was under the authority of the bishopric of Caesarea, where the governor lived. Rome claimed privilege but was simply too far away from the core of the Empire to be significant. Antioch and Alexandria were the great Christian cities of the East, but Constantinople now became the preeminent bishopric, highlighting the extent to which the church had become a political institution, although this was highly resented by Rome and Alexandria.

The authority of bishops was consolidated by tying them into the structure of the legal system. Constantine had extended to bishops the rights of all magistrates to hear civil suits and free slaves. Sitting in courts became a major part of a bishop's life. The Church's attitude toward slavery was of acceptance, and most wealthier Christians owned slaves themselves. Augustine "who was always conservative in social affairs, took matters further in asserting that slavery is God's punishment for evil."

It was an ancient tradition that a city should glorify itself through its temples, and the bishops and emperor lavished funds on the building and adornment of churches. The basilica, the edifice used as the audience halls of the emperors, was adopted as the most appropriate form as Christian churches, unlike temples, needed to house congregations. The costs were tremendous, as churches were gilded and bejeweled. Although Jesus disdained the display of wealth, there were precedents in the Old Testament and Revelation to justify it. "If heaven is so rich in treasure, then a basilica can be seen as a symbol of heaven on earth and as worthy of similar decoration." If churches were now a symbol of heaven, the figures of the holy family and the saints were modeled on the imperial court, dressed as emperors and their court. Even the martyrs, who rejected the vanities of the world, were depicted as an empress or emperor.

While the emperors initiated the massive patronage required to build the churches, it became a badge of faith for wealthy Christians to contribute. Often wealthy women would make over much of their estate to the support of a church. The finest churches were those of the great cities. The bishops' estates, properties, churches and institutions (all tax-exempt) transformed them into estate managers and financial overlords as well as major employers. Bishops held office often for life, while provincial governors generally stayed in a post only for a few years, contributing to their status and influence. Such men were necessarily drawn from the traditional elites, skilled in rhetoric and management.

Freeman notes that many bishops also established programs for the destitute and funded them. These went beyond traditional patronage by giving to those who had nothing and no influence, including food and medical services.

However, the prestige of bishoprics was now so high that they were often fought over bitterly, literally. "The linking of access to resources with orthodoxy was bound to lead to nasty rivalries when doctrine was so fluid." Bishops attempted to discredit rival bishops and even bribed officials for support. The original framework of Christianity, set in a framework where power, wealth, even conventional social ties were renounced, had now been embedded within the social, political and legal establishment.

Chapter 14: Six Emperors and a Bishop--Ambrose of Milan

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, is presented as the most fascinating example of how a bishop survived the tricky and unsettled political climate of the late fourth century. Milan was the "linchpin of the western empire", serving as a court of the emperors but close enough to the northern borders to serve as a base to launch campaigns. From 355 to 374, Auxentius, a Homoean, had been bishop with the support of Constantius and Valentinian. On his death, peace was threatened by unrest between the Homoeans and supporters of the Nicene Creed. Ambrose, the local provincial governor, was summoned to keep order and was acclaimed by the populace and accepted by the emperor Valentinian as bishop, even though he was not even a baptized Christian at the time.

Ambrose was at ease with the exercise of authority, as the son of a prefect, an effective orator, and a flair for politics. He was not, however, an original thinker and although he knew Greek, he never fully understood the theologies he now had to absorb. His most famous pastoral work was a Christian reworking of Cicero's On Duties and he was warned about his plagiarizing of Greek works by Jerome. Ambrose was naturally austere in habit and he was preoccupied by virginity, one of the first to preach the perpetual virginity of Mary, and he classified Christians by their degree of sexual purity. He inspired his most famous convert, Augustine, to make it a badge of Christian faith. Ambrose was able to maintain good order between the rival Christian communities in his first years, although he came to believe in the common divinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and ended up a fervent supporter of the Nicene Creed.

When the young co-emperor Valentinian and his mother Justina fled to Milan after the defeat in Thrace, Justina demanded of the emperor Gratian a basilica in Milan to house the Homoeans, and this attracted a large community. Ambrose was asked by Gratian to give an account of his faith, which resulted in Ambrose's first two books De Fide. This work doesn't develop the Nicene Creed, simply adopting the belief of common divinity (common in the West) and engaging in a polemical attack on a range of beliefs that Ambrose lumped under the umbrella of Arianism. This made for some odd bedfellows and aroused opposition, resulting in Ambrose producing 3 more books of De Fide. However, the books impressed the emperor Gratian, who moved his own court to Milan. After his death, however, the struggles resumed between Justina and the Homoeans versus Ambrose and supporters of the Nicene Creed. Valentinan and Justina had to flee the advance of Maximus, a pretender to the throne, to the East and Theodosius, who then defeated Maximus, returned Valentinian to the West, and came himself to Milan, the fifth emperor under whom Ambrose had served.

Theodosius, although a supporter of the Nicene Creed, was less impressionable than the younger emperors with whom Ambrose had interacted. In an attempt to get his attention and forge a relationship, Ambrose campaigned for the emperor's support after a bishop and his congregation burned down a synagogue, claiming there should be no building where Christ was denied. This is the first instance where the protection the empire granted to the persons and property of the Jews was relaxed.

Theodosius then used Ambrose and the church to ameliorate the consequences of a massacre he ordered in Thessalonika, by requesting penance. Ambrose, however, reframed it as the emperor accepting the supremacy of the church over state matters. The latter view ended up triumphing. When imperial rule collapsed in less than a century, the church survived and the event became part of its mythology, giving it power over secular rulers. In addition, Theodosius after his penance passed laws that banned cult worship at pagan shrines. Christian mobs now began destroying the great shrines of the ancient world and the Olympic games, nearly 1200 years after their start, were held for the last time in 395.

Theodosius died in 395 and Ambrose at Easter in 397. Ambrose had been committed to imposing the dominance of the church on secular society and he hammered this message home in his sermons and writings. It was this combination of spiritual message with the use of personal authority and passionate rhetoric that made Ambrose so formidable and earned him a place among the founding fathers of the Roman Catholic Church.

Chapter 15: Interlude--Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and the Defence of Paganism

This short chapter is primarily an analysis of the symbols on a surviving diptych which show a number of pagan references and is deemed to show that the pagan tradition was still strong even late in the fourth century.

Rome, although still largely intact at this time, is marginal to the government of the Empire, moved both north and east. The senatorial families of the city retained their prestige and their wealth and mostly their pagan roots. At this time, there was increasing pressure from church and emperor to convert, with Paul's influence being particularly powerful in rejecting pagan symbols and statues. The senators wrote to Valentinian II when he succeeded Gratian in 383, not only deploring the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate house, but also the denigration of what it represented, the diverse spiritual world of paganism and the freedom of thought it allowed. Ambrose saw the letter and prevailed with the Emperor, saying that the Word of God gave us the whole truth.

Freeman sees this as a pivotal moment, where the Greek speculative tradition allowing for many ways to the truth is replaced by the Christian tradition in which wisdom rests with God alone. He sees these as totally different ways of approaching and interpreting the world. By the fifth century, Christianity was dominant in Rome, with most of the old families converted and the old temples left to decay or transformed into churches.

Chapter 16: The Ascetic Odyssey

"A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind" The Ascetic Paula, a Roman aristocrat, to her nuns

This chapter looks at the contrast between the new wealth of the Church and the complete renunciation of wealth by many individual Christians who sought refuge in asceticism.

The idea of disciplined training, askesis, was intrinsic to the ancient world whether for games or statesmanship. In somewhat the same way, the Christian hermit who tortures his body to come close to God is a case where discipline eventually brings the possibility of a spiritual transformation.

Asceticism is a complex phenomenon. There is the implication that the mind or soul has a relationship with the body (and that they are separate entities) and this can be manipulated for some higher end, usually the mind or soul subjugating the body. Plato divided the soul into reason, spirit and sensuality, and when the sensual part of the soul aligns with the body, the individual is prevented from reaching any "higher" state. The association of renunciation and the achievement of a higher state of being is at the heart of the ascetic experience.

Continence and emotional restraint were widely valued, and any excess passion or behavior frowned upon. Stoicism was a popular philosophical framework that supported this. So when Christians turned toward asceticism, they were not in new territory but there were elements that took it beyond mere conventional restraint, often into obsessive intensity. There were other groups (the Essenes, the Gnostics, and the Manicheans, for example) who also preached extreme asceticism. Jesus himself had called for poverty and his death enshrined a tradition of suffering at the core of Christian history. Christians of the 4th century were haunted by the agonies of martyrs of the previous generation. For many, it was as if suffering had to be undergone as a mark of one's faith, even to the extent of inflicting it on oneself.

This sense of guilt would have been exacerbated by the new wealth and accepted status of the Church, even as the sufferings of the poor and sick continued while the new wealth corrupted many clergy into lavish lifestyles. So reasonable Christians, remembering the life of Jesus, might withdraw from such pomp and circumstance in reaction. In addition, with the development of an afterlife in heaven of eternal bliss or hell of perpetual tormet, if the soul could be purified, the consequences were enormous. To be confident of salvation, one could not take the risk of anything less than total commitment.

While many pagan philosophers had seen an ascetic approach a requiring no more than a shift of perspective, a reorienting of the personality or soul, Christians tended to dramatize desires, particularly sexual desires (these were all men, btw--personal comment), as seen with Jerome, St. John Chrysostom ("How shall we tie down this wild beast? I know none, save only the restraint of hell fire."), Augustine, and Anthony.

Clarification: the aim was not to torment the flesh itself, but the sins of the flesh. Since Christ had taken on flesh and, at the Last Judgment the individual's flesh would be returned, flesh could not be evil in itself. Asceticism is necessary to strengthen the will against the onslaught of demons/sin. Many ascetics removed themselves to the desert, a milieu where the body is tested to its physical limit and removed from the distractions and temptations of civilization. The Egyptian desert was one of the first and the most prestigious settings. Eventually so many took to the desert that it was said to be as busy as a city. The Syrian desert was also popular, and ascetics would live on pillars in hopes of coming closer to heaven.

Anthony was an archetype of the desert ascetic. He was an Egyptian Christian who spoke Coptic rather than Greek and he did not bother to learn to read or write. Over a long life, he moved further and further into the deep desert. His life was written up by Athanasius or someone close to him and he was described as "possessed of perfect self-control, freedom from passion--the ideal of every monk and ascetic striving for perfection." Many followed in his footsteps and a whole genre of literature in which the ascetic became a celebrity. Famous collections of holy lives blended historical fact with amazing tales of miracles. Manuals explained how to become an ascetic. Many ordinary Christians took up asceticism in their homes. Women refused to marry, couples gave up sex. Perhaps the most profound transformation n the fourth and fifth century was in women who adopted a view of perpetual virginity. This reversal of traditional role was difficult to handle and such women were often considered as honorary men. This gave such women roles of much greater power and influence.

Along with the elevation of virginity in these years came the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary. She now became the ideal of virginal womanhood. Even though the verse from Isaiah in the Septuagint, "A virgin will conceive", was a mis-translation and early Church fathers concentrated on contrasting Mary with Eve, in the fourth century is when the concept of Mary as perpetual virgin developed. The cult took its strength from the need for a symbol of female virginity, and its power was evident in the way that the interpretation of scriptures was distorted to support it. Doctrinally, this culminated in the declaration that Mary was the Mother of God (Theotokos) in 431 at the Council of Ephesus.

The worship of Mary was not confined to ascetics. The need for a goddess figure was profound in a religion founded by Jesus and shaped by Paul, two unmarried men. She came to absorb the attributes of pagan goddesses. These stories were adopted by the Church hierarchy at the highest level.

A consequence of the elevation of virginity was to transform women who did not espouse it into temptresses, daughters of Eve, leading to the dichotomy of virgin and whore with no acceptable expression of female sexuality in between. While this became deeply engrained in later Christian tradition, it's important to not that there were committed Christians who refused to endorse it, such as Justinian, a monk from Rome. Justinian asked why a virgin would be given prominence in the eyes of God over a married person. What was important was baptism followed by a life committed to faith and true repentance from sin. He had good scriptural support and his views, balanced and realistic, appealed to many. So of course Jerome had to write a vicious counter-attack which resulted in Jovinian being declared a heretic, and sex and sin remained inextricably linked in the Christian tradition.

While asceticism could be seen as a turning of one's back on one's fellow men in search of salvation for oneself, another theme was that the ascetic served as an intermediary between God and man. They could receive revelation, recognize demons, and divert demons from others. However, the more stable and less tortured of those drawn to asceticism began to realize that peace of mind was not easy to develop and that there were drawbacks to the ascetic life. In the fourth century, there was a growing impulse to come together to share an ascetic life in community. Monasteries first appeared in the Egyptian desert, but the concept of communal living spread rapidly throughout the east by 355.

Cassian founded a number of monasteries closer to cities. He appreciated the benefits of asceticism without being a fanatic, and develop an organized structure of prayer, reading and meditation, a disciplined pattern of living under authority. Under his influence, asceticism became a part of the mainstream of Christianity in the west, albeit one that rejected political involvement. Now reined in to communities under authority, they did not challenge the authority of Church and State.

Still, asceticism reflected and reinforced an intense preoccupation with the individual self that was to become central to the Christian experience. One can never know whether one is truly saved. There is no way to judge objectively just how guilty one is in the eyes of God. The only true way to secure a rest from tension on earth is to escape completely from the exercise of moral responsibility--the virtue of obedience becomes crucial.

Chapter 17: Eastern Christianity and the Emergence of the Byzantine Empire, 395-600

In 395, the Roman empire was formally split in two, with Theodosius’ son Arcadius in the Greek-speaking East and his son Honorius in the Latin-speaking West. While the East was able to consolidate its territory and maintain its empire until overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the western empire disintegrated. This had profound implications for Christianity, which now would develop within two different linguistic and political cultures. Whatever doctrinal differences are seen as marking the split of the Church, they were rooted in these political and linguistic differences. In the East, Church and state remained closely bound, in the west the bishops eventually regained their independence and negotiated new roles within society.

During the fourth century the emperor had consolidated his position as absolute ruler, with his quasi-divine status. It was written, “The emperor bears the image of God, just as the bishop bears the image of Christ,” by Ambrosiaster. Representations of heaven in Christian mosaics were modeled on the imperial court. This image was matched by the emperor’s power, especially his punitive power, which was wielded more typically in an Old Testament fashion than the New Testament.

Both the Byzantine empire and the Church were constantly preoccupied with survival and became natural allies. The laws against Jews and non-orthodox Christians reached a new coherence and severity, with harsh punishments. The mentality of Christian “weakness” persisted even when the church in reality had achieved strength, and tensions beset the church in the late fourth and fifth centuries, especially in the conflict between the roles of bishop as Christian leader and as imperial servant. An example of this was the life of John Chrysostom (347-407).

John converted to Christianity as a young man. Like so many, he spent several years as an ascetic and always retained his abhorrence of sex, claiming God had intended Adam and Eve to be an asexual couple. Heavily influenced by Paul, he always interpreted him in the most gloomy and grudging way. John’s asceticism permanently damaged his health, but he was eventually ordained a priest in his native city. He became the most popular and influential preacher in Antioch due to the clarity of his language, the emotional power of his rhetoric, and his concentration on everyday challenges. He denounced wealthy women, even the virgins, flaunting their dress and jewels and men obsessed with food and sport while beggars were dying in the cold. He also used his powers of invective against the Jews, calling them dogs, perverts and tarts, and his writings on this subject persisted in influence long after their composition.

In 398, John was unexpectedly asked to become bishop of Constantinople. This could have been an important promotion, but John was hopelessly unsuited for the post. He failed to grasp that in Constantinople more than anywhere else the church was subservient to the state and was made uneasy by the luxury of the court and unceasing in his criticism of the clergy and nobility. He aroused enormous resentment and had no sense of building alliances and support, with his only power base the common people who relished his populist sermons. So when the Alexandrian bishop, Theophilus, challenged his position, John was vulnerable. The empress Eudora was incensed at his criticism of the vanities of women and supported Theophilus when he came to Constantinople, and John was temporarily banished. Even though he was recalled, he did not last long thereafter. He died in exile in 407.

John’s contemporary, Ambrose, in Milan, in contrast knew the intricacies of imperial administration and also the importance of keeping local bishops and clergy on his side. When he used crowds it was in an organized way with clear objectives.

The rivalry between Constantinople and Alexandria erupted again in the debate that dominated the first half of the fifth centure over the true nature of Jesus on earth. By incorporating Jesus fully into the Godhead, the Nicene Creed had created a new controversy. In the tradition, pre-Nicene formulations, the “logos” of Christ was something less than the Godhead. Since the “logos” was not God and although incarnated in Christ, it did not have to show the attributes of an eternal God so there was no difficulty accepting Jesus suffering on the cross. However, the Nicene formulation, where Jesus was always part of the Godhead and remained so while on earth, raised new difficulties as to how he could be human at the same time. If the “logos” really was part of the Godhead, consubstantial with it, then the “logos” could not suffer any more than God could. Yet Jesus in the Gospels did appear to suffer. These questions spawned a variety of putative solutions. There were still the adoptionists who insisted Jesus was fully human and only adopted by God as his Son. The Doceticists taught that Jesus only gave the appearance of being human but was completely divin and unable to suffer. The Apollinarians and others argued that Christ had a human body but his soul and mind remained divine. Another bishop argued that Jesus had been conceived twice, once in divine form and once in human form. But each attempted resolution simply raised more issues.

Connected to this debate was the status of the Virgin Mary, as she became the object of growing person devotion and her status rested on her role as the mother of Jesus. Was the the bearer of God (Theotokos) or of a man (Anthropotokos)? Nestorius, appointed bishop of Constantinople in 428, worried that Theotokos denied the human nature of Jesus altogether, although he would compromise on Christokos. He still had difficulty with Jesus’ status although he favored the word “conjunction” of the two natures. But his made him vulnerable to the new bishop of Alexandria, Cyril. Cyril championed the Theotokos formula and saw the issue as a way to undermine Nestorius and Constantinople’s influence. He circulated a pastoral letter explaining that the Nicene Creed made Theotokos the only possible title for Mary and persuaded the bishop of Rome, Celestine, to agree, as well as the young emperor’s powerful sister Pulcheria. The debate degenerated into a power struggle and Cyrus arrived at the Council of Ephesus in 431 with a large group of strong men and produced a conclusion before Nestorius and his supporters had even arrived, then used massive bribery to keep the imperial court on his side. Nestorius was condemned as a heretic.

In 449, another attempt at solving the controversy aroused even greater anger. A second council at Ephesus was dominated by Cyril’s successor, Dioscorus. He used imperial support and armed guards to bully his way into control of the council and force bishops to sign their names to blank pieces of paper. But now the emperors had learned their lesson--doctrine could not be settled when personal and institutional rivalries were allowed to stop debate. Once again imperial control had to be asserted. Monks were barred from church business, the prestige of Constantinople was enhanced, and it was stated that after the Incarnation, Christ was at all times fully God and fully human with two natures without confusion, change or separation, and disagreeing with this was punishable by law.

However, the debate had gone on for so long with so many different views developed that it continued to be an ongoing source of controversy. In the 490s there were riots in Constantinople when a phrase suggesting a single nature was added to the liturgy of Hagia Sophia. In truth, it was probably impossible to make any satisfactory reconciliation between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of a Christ with two natures. Once again the state had to declare a compromise formula then enforced by law.

Because of the preservation of the writings of those who came to be considered the early church fathers and because the church was so deeply embedded in the legal and political system, in hindsight the church seems much more powerful than it really was at this point. Perhaps the majority of subjects of the empire continued to live within their traditional cultures. A conversion to Christianity was often not abrupt. A catechumen could linger for years on the brink of baptism, and not be subject therefore to the rules of the Church. The Virgin Mary, saints and martyrs, as well as the angels and demons, filled the Christian world with as many supernatural presences as the pagan world, and Christians continued to believe in the existence of the pagan gods as demons. Many Christian ceremonies were linked to existing pagan festivals, and served the same purposes of fertility, safety from enemies, safe childbirth and good weather. Pagans treated Christian shrines as another manifestation of the divine, equal to pagan shrines, and even adopted Christian imagery.

The church, even while adapting to some degree to existing practices, was deeply rooted in the rejections of Judaism and paganism and heretics. With its new official status, it could take the initiative against its enemies. This took the form not only of reallocating moneys to churches from temples but also of deliberate destruction of statues, inscriptions and temples. This destruction was revolutionary in that the very fabric of city life had grown around the sacred precincts over centuries. The elimination of paganism was accompanied by a dampening of emotion, dance and song so effective that we still lower our voices when we enter a church. Under Justinian (emperor 527-65), the full weight of the law was enforced against paganism. One of his laws ended the imperial toleration of all religions extended by Constantine in 313. The death penalty was decreed for those who practiced pagan cults and after 900 years of teaching, Plato’s Academy was closed in Athens in 529. Yet even then, paganism continued to flourish, especially in the country and mountains. While Byzantium survived as a Christian theocratic state, around it other pieces of the puzzle that still define world politics in the 21st century were being put into place.

Chapter 18: The Emergence of Catholic Christianity in the West, 395-640

Rome, although nominally the center of the Empire at the time of the Apostles, was actually at the far edge of Christianity. The early Church was predominantly Greek and flourished far more vigorously in the eastern than the western empire. Even 6 centuries later, Pope Gregory the Great would write to his brother bishops in Antioch and Alexandria, “Separated from you by great stretches of land and the sea...” The geographical separation was intensified by the linguistic gulf. The works of many of the Greek Church Fathers never reached the Latin west in translation; there were difficulties getting Latin texts of the ecumenical councils. Even in Rome, the Christian community was marginal in a city where the pagan senatorial aristocracy remained dominant to the end of the fourth century. When the political power moved to the east with Constantinople, Rome’s primacy as a bishopric was even further eroded.

Part of the difficulty was translating a movement deeply rooted in the Greek cultural and philosophical world into the Greek one. The first significant theologian to write in Latin was Tertullian, in North Africa at Carthage. He spoke both Greek and Latin and trained as a lawyer prior to his conversion in his thirties. He was rigid in his approach to social issues and used uncompromising rhetoric with strong emotional effect. He castigated intellectuals and gloried in paradox, taunting the Greek philosophers. He portrayed the world as essentially hostile to Christians, where they could never relax their guard, and the threat of sexual temptation was ever present. Tertullian contributed an abiding fear of woman as temptress to the western tradition, and his views became more rigid with age.

Jerome was deeply influenced by Tertullian; in fact, most of what we know about Tertullian’s life comes from Jerome himself. Jerome (345-420) seems to have been an isolated and troubled individual, tormented by his sexuality and super-sensitive to any hint of personal betrayal and obsessive about the necessity for asceticism. His mastery of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and meticulous knowledge of scriptures gave him the reputation as the leading western scholar of his day despite his personality. His Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments is his masterpiece.

Jerome was born on the border of Dalmatia but educated and baptized in Rome. He then went east, where he was ordained a priest in Antioch and spent several years in the Syrian desert. Here he perfected his Greek and learned Hebrew, the only Christian other than Origen to study it in such depth. When Jerome returned to Rome in the 380s, he was recommended to Damasus, bishop of Rome, as a personal secretary and it was Damasus who suggested a proper translation of Scriptures into Latin. This occupied Jerome for several years, his most stable and productive of his life. But his aggressive asceticism and criticism of the nobility, leading women, and other clergy resulted in his being driven from Rome upon Damasus’ death. He never forgave Rome for the rejection, seeing the city indeed as the “whore of Babylon”.

A wealthy ascetic woman, Paula, went with him and they settled in Bethlehem where her wealth was used to found two monasteries to support them and their followers. The Latin version of the Gospels had been completed and Jerome spent the next 20 years translating the Hebrew scriptures. This work aroused suspicion and fear that a rival to the Greek Septuagint version might result in a break between east and west, and was only completely accepted in the 9th century.

Translation seemed Jerome’s strength; he was less at ease with original and creative work. Most of his commentaries are drawn almost entirely from earlier commentators, especially Origen, although he later publicly rejected Origen’s original and creative theology when it became politically suspect. Jerome had many correspondents; perhaps the most well known now was a younger and brilliant theologian from north Africa, Augustine. Augustine asked Jerome to make more Latin translations as his own Greek was weak, especially that ”Origen you mention with particular pleasure.” His suggestion of an alternate to one of Jerome’s interpretation of scriptures unleashed Jerome’s vituperativeness, but Augustine responded with conciliation. However, Jerome died a lonely and isolated man in 419 or 420.

Augustine, through his sheer intellectual power, probing curiosity, originality, range of concern and enormous output of work, has come to be seen as the cornerstone of western Christian tradition. He remains a deeply controversial figure, his reputation burdened with the responsibility of integrating sinfulness into human nature and with his gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority. He also came from northern Africa, and his mother Monnica was a major influence on his life due to her dominating and stifling love. However, he did manage to achieve independence through university and became a teacher of literature in Carthage for about 15 years. He attached himself to the Manichean sect for about 9 years, which drew strong distinctions between the Evil of the world and body and the Good of light and their eternal battle, the conclusion of which was not predetermined. However, Augustine eventually became disillusioned. At around the same time, he decided to go to Rome to find a better living as a teacher. His mother showed up at the pier, hoping either to drag him home or go with him to Rome, but he gave her the slip. However, it troubled him and he was ill when he arrived at Rome. Rome did not work out, but Augustine found a position in Milan where he encountered Ambrose. He was not a Christian at this point, but a seeker. The Platonists first impressed him, giving him a sense of eternal and unassailable good. He was deeply impressed by Ambrose’s preaching and personality. He came to believe that while Platonism might represent the highest intellectual and spiritual point of the pagan world, Christianity went beyond it and provided an everlasting haven.

This conversion to Christianity had the benefit of reconciliation with his mother, who had appeared in Milan, sent his long-time lover back to Africa, and arranged a suitable marriage for him. Although Augustine rejected the marriage, he made peace with his mother. He returned to Africa in 388, where orthodox Christianity was on the defensive from the Donatists and pagans. So he was persuaded to become a priest, and then a bishop of Hippo where he remained until his death in 430. He appears to have been an excellent pastor, but became culturally isolated in the bleakly authoritarian African tradition. His writings became polarized and his use of reason diminished while his reliance on faith increased. So it was in his early years as bisho that Augustine wrote his most famous and accessible work, the Confessions. For the first time in western literature the world of the interior mind was explored in a dialogue with God, albeit an angry, punitive God, a God who actively punishes as a form of showing love. His development of the doctrine of original sin becomes even more unsettling as God’s punishment extends to life on earth. The contrast with Origen’s loving God who welcomes all souls, even that of Satan, back to him is stark.

Although in his early writings in the 380s Augustine accepted the importance of reason in finding truth, by the next decade he was increasingly relying on faith and the acceptance of authority using the humility of Christ, both the authority of the church and the scriptures. Reason now only plays a supporting role as the means through which one learns that authority must be accepted. His later stress on the effects of the Fall upon man supported the idea that man is corrupted and cannot use reason to grasp God. He paired this with a growing acceptance of miracles as common events.

From the 390s Augustine studied the scriptures intensively, writing commentaires on them, although handicapped by his inability to read Hebrew and his limited Greek. The Latin translations he used were very poor, but Augustine insisted the scriptures could not contradict each other and, as the truth was already known, the main job was to interpret texts to fit orthodoxy. He also believed that every other form of learning had to be subjected to the scriptures. Unfortunately, one of the poor translations seemed to mean that all individuals sinned through Adam, while the original Greek stated that sin, which entered the world as a result of Adam’s action, was a “cosmic” force burdening all humanity in general, not born uniquely in each individual. “No wonder the concept of original sin never travelled to the Greek world.” Only 5 texts from the whole of scripture can be claimed to support the concept, and three of those rested on mistranslations. Augustine’s writings on original sin and on free will (or its lack) became hugely influential in western Christianity, along with his insistence that man can only be saved through God’s grace rather than good works or even church membership. Sin is passed on through sexual intercourse, so again sexual desire is linked with evil. Augustine expects man to fail.

Augustine’s first major opponent was Pelagius, living first in Rome and later in Jerusalem. He stressed the possibility that human beings might conduct their own salvation through the power of reason and the exercise of free will. In 415, the debate erupted into open conflict. After much back and forth within the church, the emperors stepped in and condemned Pelagianism in yet another political decision. There were also disagreements with the Donatists, the largest Christian community in north Africa. The Donatists represented a pure tradition straight from the Apostles and uncorrupted by Rome and were clearly not heretics, yet were not under the authority of the orthodox church. Again, the emperor Honorius in 405 issued an edict ordering the unity of both churches and branded the Donatists as heretics and therefore subject to the rigor of law. Although in his earlier works Augustine was reluctant to condone the compelling of outsiders into the church, it was he who developed a rationale of persecution at this time. Just as God could punish in the exercise of his love, so too could the church, knowing that it was saving sinners from everlasting hell fire.

In 430 the Vandals (a Goth tribe) swept across north Africa and besieged Hippo. Augustine died during the siege before the city fell. At that point, both orthodox and Donatist Christians were overwhelmed with the original Homoean heresy, which had been fervently adopted by the Goths before it was outlawed by Theodosius.

As imperial authority crumbled in the west, the role of the bishops of Rome gradually expanded. The one figure symbolizing the growing power and influence of rome, it is Leo, one of only two popes to be labeled “the Great.” He became pope in 440 and reigned until his death in 461. He had a forceful personality and was determined to enforce his authority as heir of Peter over the other bishops of the west. He issued and enforced decrees on church government, the authority of bishops, and the ordination of clergy. He also tied his authority to the state by acting through the emperor Valentinian III, and even confronted Attila the Hun successfully. He also was the first bishop of Rome to affect church doctrine and his Tome, a formulation of the two natures of Christ in one person, was adopted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

However, a century later, Vigilius (bishop of Rome 537-555) was unable to resist the emperor Justinian in the continuing controversies in the east. The west had accepted the Chalcedonian formula a century earlier but the bishops of the east continued to fight over the matter. Justinian wanted political support from the Monophysites and wanted to condemn a writing of the Nestorians to get that support. He kidnapped Virgilius, taken to Constantinople, and kept until he agreed to condemn the writing. This was hugely unpopular in the west, so much so that Virgilius was refused burial in St. Peter’s upon his death.

At this point , the relationship between the church in the west and the church in the east began to disintegrate. The west had barely been represented at most of the church councils, almost all held in the east starting with the first council of Constantinople. At a time when cultural unity in the empire was breaking down, classical learning was fading and the main diet of scholars was Christian writing. The new world emerging in the west was represented by Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome 590-604. He was the son of a Roman senator and had served as prefect of the city before selling his properties and founding monasteries. He became pope of a decaying city, with broken aqueducts and many deserted parts of the city. He was not an original thinker and relied heavily on the writings of Augustine and Ambrose, distrusting secular learning and pride in intellectual independence. Gregory celebrated miracles and in all these matters was expressing what had become the conventional wisdom of his time. However, he was free of the obsession with heresy held by so many of his predecessors, and thought deeply and sensitively about how bishops and pastors could exercise their authority. He championed the rule of St. Benedict, a balance of austerity and humanity, and resisted extremes. Gregory also moderated the more extreme consequences of Augustinian theology, refusing to believe that God was so harsh that a sinner who died by accident before completing his penance would necessarily go to hell, and provided an early definition of purgatory. He accepted that good works and pious practices are of value to God and intercede for those in purgatory. He stressed the importance of music in worship and the Gregorian chant is named for him. He was not obsessed with the problem of evil or sexuality. It was this kind of leadership, humane but unquestioned in its moral authority, that was needed to establish the papacy’s independence of the east, and Gregory is usually seen as the founder of the medieval papacy.

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 and lost to Rome. Because these had provided the most effective challenge to Rome’s authority, it simplified the issue and the Roman church basically completed its separation from from the east both politically and theologically in the eighth century.

Following Augustine, no one in the western church could be sure of salvation. Preoccupation with internal battles and the inherent sinfulness of humankind took and ever more powerful hold in medieval times, unlike the eastern church. The agony on the cross makes sense only in the context of man’s sinfulness, and it became increasingly shown in prurient detail in art. This rupture with the classical world’s conception of “man” was firmly associated with the attack on rationalism, as can be seen in Augustine’s assertion that man’s power to think rationally has been corrupted forever by Adam’s sin.

Yet at the same time, the Roman Catholic Church was assuming responsibility for the poor and unloved. The tradition of learning was narrow, but what education there was was preserved by the church as was health care. As imperial authority had disappeared, the Church in the west began to fill a vacuum, preserving Roman law and a structure of institutional authority. Christianity now took on a new role as an agent of social cohesion in a world build upon the ruins of empire. What remained was a tension between the obedience demanded by institutional Christianity and the original Gospel message of ambivalence to authority.

Chapter 19: “We Honour the Privilege of Silence Which is Without Peril”: The Death of the Greek Empirical Tradition

This chapter opens with quotes from the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov when Jesus has returned to earth, been recognized, and is thrown in prison for threatening to subvert the Church. “Did you forget that a tranquil mind and even death is dearer to man than a free choice in the knowledge of good and evil?” You hoped, the Inquisitor tells Jesus, that people would worship you out of free will and without the need for miracles, but what they really yearn for is good order. The Church, the Inquisitor concludes, had, through the use of “mystery, magic, and authority” sootghed the anxieties that Jesus had raised.

“Mystery, magic, and authority” are very relevant in defining Christianity as it had developed by the end of the fourth century, which was characterized by destructive conflicts over doctrine in which personal animosities had often prevailed over reasoned debate. Although church fathers saw differences as a host of heresies, 80 or more, that assailed the church, it would appear the real problem was that the diversity of sources for Christian doctrine and the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy made any kind of coherent “truth” difficult to sustain. “A desperation to establish doctrinal certainty, a desperation made more intense by the fear of eternal punishment in an area where certainty was, in rational terms, so hard to achieve, helps explain why the level of bitterness in Christian debate was so high, much higher that it was in the more open world of pagan philosophy.”

One way to calm the theological turmoil was to declare that ultimately God was unknowable. Gregory of Nazeanzus (c. 329-390) was thrust into this turmoil and argued with his fellow Cappadocian Basil that ultimately the nature of God is a mystery and the proper response to questions about his nature is silence. His experience in presiding over the Council of Constantinople appalled him. He wrote, “I finished my speech, but they squawked in every direction...” John Chrysostom also inveighed against those who speculated on God. There were of course conceptual issues raised by the idea of an unknowable God. The Nicene Creed is composed mostly of positive statement of what God IS, and He has frequently revealed Himself in the scriptures. Essentially, the problem was that the Christian concept of God had evolved in too many different and conflicting contexts. By the end of the 4th century, this theological development (the unknowable God) suited the political needs of the emperors. Theodosius II was particularly anxious to bring order into government and religion, as seen in his Code of Laws. While he was outmaneuvered by Cyril, a later council in 451 at Chalcedon was better prepared, where a compromise formula on the nature of Christ was prepared and imposed.

The west, however, was increasingly free of imperial control, alternative structures of authority emerged. Gregory the Great consolidated a rational of papal supremacy, reaching back through history and scripture to impose ideological coherence. Orthodoxy thus became seamless and given unanimous and consistent backing from scriptures, Apostles, Church Fathers, and ecumenical councils. When new disputes arose, it was now the pope who would have final say.

Confronted by the terrible animosities of Christian debate in the fourth century, relief can be felt about the silence falling upon the western churches. Yet there is a difference between accepting that ultimately the nature of God cannot be known, and proscribing speculations about it altogether. The ancient Greek tradition that one should be free to speculate without fear and be encouraged to take individual moral responsibility for one’s views was rejected. In the Christian tradition, it was God who spoke through his preachers, who were merely the conductors of His word. No longer is coherence of argument valued. Augustine follows Tertullian in arguing that it is the very irrationality of the Christian message that is its strength. Aristotle became a casualty and he essentially disappears from the western world, with the exception of two works of logic, until the 13th century. The impact of this fundamental change in approach on intellectual life was profound. One effect was the decline of book learning. Libraries went into decline and debate disappeared. The penalties for transgressing the boundaries of discussion became too great.

In the east, there was increasing emphasis on learning by rote from a select list of texts and a fixed repertoire of images and icons, another means by which the Church defined what it was acceptable to believe.

Both Platonism and Galen were frozen into Christian views of the world. The preservation of their “magic” was frozen and separated from rational investigation and scientific approach. Sickness was not understood within a specifically Christian perspective, where the soul is of greater value than the body and suffering is part of the Christian condition. Sickness was a punishment of God and the relics of martyrs, texts and icons became sources of miracles. Demons are found everywhere and the world became suffused with miraculous happenings. The subversion of the natural order of things by miracles becomes one of the distinguishing features of Christianity and of necessity goes hand in hand with the waning of scientific thought.

There is increasing scientific evidence that reason and emotion need to live side by side in the healthy mind. So paradox had balance to logic. Jesus’ insistence that the poor, the rejected and the unloved may have something to contribute was a major development in western ethical tradition. However, the swing to irrationality as a universal truth to the exclusion of reason became embedded in Christian tradition and used to sustain the authority of the Church. Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity were recast as sins of pride and the inevitable result was intellectual stagnation.

Chapter 20: Thomas Aquinas and the Restoration of Reason

Freeman opens this chapter with an illustration of how a basilica built in the middle of the 5th century in Syria remained a place of pilgrimage for 500 years after the area was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, showing that it was possible for a monotheistic faith to assert its identity without necessitating the destruction of other faiths. In one paragraph, he touches on what the whole of Al-Khalili’s book above explains in depth--how Avicenna, Al-Razi, Imn al-Nafis, Averroes and others translated and then built upon the Greek works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy and others. (Of course, Al-Khalili also shows how the toleration of the Muslim caliphs waxed and waned over this time as well.)

As Christianity spread throughout western Europe, it gained confidence in itself and a relaxation of tension. However, it was accompanied by an intense concentration on the other world at the expense of this one. For centuries there was no sign of a renaissance of independent thought, and most scholarly work focused on analyzing, summarizing and commenting on the canon of authoritative texts. The only western Christian philosopher of note between Boethius (524) and Anselm in the eleventh century was the ninth-century Irishman Erigena. He played an important role in founding western mysticism and his work was, in fact, too original for the church which declared him heretical in the thirteenth century.

In the 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) raised the possibility that reason could again play a part in orthodox Christian thought, arguing that certain tenets of faith could be proved by reason. But it was not until the twelfth century that a newly emerging investigative spirit began to rediscover the classical tradition through Arabic preservation and elaboration of the Greek texts (found in part as Christians were re-conquering Spain). Translations into Latin sprang up and the first universities were founded, where secular learning could be taught as long as it did not subvert the authority of the Church. (These movements were the crux of Hannam’s work God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science.) Yet Aristotle was still regarded with suspicion and the University of Paris forbade the use of his works in 1215. Albert the Great, a German Dominican, was the first to promote Aristotle to Christian Europe, claiming the scientific exploration of the world was of value in itself and would enhance knowledge of God.

In 1284, Albert acquired a new student, called Thomas Aquinas. He was to incorporate Aristotle into the Roman Catholic tradition with such intellectual power and hoherence that is some areas of thought the two became virtually indistinguishable. His writings were voluminous in theology and many commentaries on Aristotle’s surviving works. However, in 1273, criticism was growing among traditionalists who resented Aquinas’ insistence on a natural underlying order of things, thus denying God’s power of miraculous intervention, and Aquinas was summoned to Lyons the following year to answer to the pope. However, he fell ill on the way and died. Three years later, several of his theses were formally condemned in Paris and Oxford. Aquinas avoided the abusive and aggressive language of the more combative theologians, believing that reason could convince on its merits. While he accepted the articles of faith revealed by God, he did not denigrate reason, presenting it as a gift of God. God wants men to use their reason to reach toward Him, and in return will reveal those things that remain impossible for the human mind to grasp.

If we are to value empirical knowledge, we must also value its tools, the senses, so the body should not be despised. Aquinas argued that it is the natural instinct of man to develop his highest capabilities to appreciate the nature and love of God. This reason should be used to make moral choices and temperance, prudence, fortitude and justice are important virtues. This concept of natural law was one of Aquinas’ most influential contributions to western thought. He restored the relationship between reason and faith, believing that one sustained the other. Faith included belief in the teachings of the Church, and yet when scientific observations challenge the teaching that “the earth was fixed on its foundation, not to be moved forever”, a conflict arose not covered in Aquinas’ legacy. Empirical evidence could challenge the authority of scriptures. It was impossible to allow orthodox Christian doctrine, much of which depended on faith or revelation, to be undermined by reason, and this meant the uses of reason in the Christian tradition had to be circumscribed so as not to subvert orthodoxy. Despite this, Aquinas’ brilliance was soon recognized and his canonization began in 1316.

Epilogue (wherein Freeman summarizes his argument)

The argument of this book has not been that Christians did not attempt to use rational means of discovering theological truths, but that reason is of only limited use in finding such truths. Rational argument begins with axioms, foundations from which an argument can progress, and proceed to conclusions on which all concur. This can be a theorem, as in mathematical logic, or empirical evidence. However, there is no agreement about the principles of theology. There is no way of assessing what is a valid or invalid revelation and as a result, there was a battle for what counted as revelation. The scriptures also do not have a consistent “axiomatic” basis, being diverse and often contradictory. Again, the churches had to eventually assume control of how scripture was to be interpreted, so that they did not conflict with orthodoxy.

So the point is that Christians could never reach agreed truths through reason. The history of Christian disputes and indeed the splintering into diverse movements occurred as soon as Christianity settled into different cultural and philosophical niches across the empire. The aspect of Christianity that was truly revolutionary was its insistence that Christians throughout the empire should adhere to a common authority. Crucial to the establishment of authority in the early church was the emergence of the bishop and the consolidation of his position within a hierarchy of bishoprics based ont he doctrine of apostolic succession. Constantine’s appreciation of the use of bishopric authority to support the empire enshrined this within the government, although the intractable doctrinal disputes between the bishops forced him to call a council and enforce a common doctrine. The theological history of the fourth century is largely one of the emperors, under immense pressure from invaders, attempting to achieve a foundation of orthodoxy so they could preserve a united society, with politics winning over theology.

The argument then is that despite attempts by Christians to use reason, it was not an appropriate way to determine theological truths. The frustrations of trying to determine these truths led to arguments becoming personal and bitter, with invective used at the expense of reasoned argument. This was a major hindrance to a state hoping to use a docile church to support its authority, thence the imposition of authority, an imposition which crushed all forms of reasoned thinking. Why is this important? Reason is a means of finding truths through deductive and inductive logic, valuable in many areas of need such as medicine. But built into a tradition of rational thought is the necessity for tolerance. Reason also provides external standards of truth, often from empirical evidence, which takes personal animosity out of debates in that disputes over the interpretation of external evidence are normally less abrasive than those between human beings struggling to assert their personal authority (although a history of science and paradigm change shows where the two often intersect--personal comment).

Philosophically, it becomes crucial to define the areas where certainty is possible and where it is not. The Greeks did this in their separation of logos and mythos. The troubles described in this book come not from the teachings of Jesus or even the nature of Christians but rather from the determination to make statements about God. Tragically, the pressures to do so were intensified by the introduction of the concept of an afterlife, in which most would be punished eternally for failure to adhere to what was eventually decided to be orthodox. If there is no external standard to define God, then figures who have the authority to define Him have to be created and this means the suppression of the freedom of independent thought.

An important theme of the book has been the linking of belief in rational thought with a belief in free will. Yet we do have a spiritual and emotional nature that gives meaning to rational thought--a healthy balance seems the goal.

It is worth asking why the political dimension to the making of Christian doctrine has been so successfully erased from the history of the western churches. It is virtually ignored in most histories of Christianity. Part of this is the integration of Plato’s Forms into Christian theology, indicating that the context, time or place or particular circumstances in which orthodox doctrine was formulated was immaterial, as it was eternal truth.

This process was complete by Gregory the Great. His immediate concern was to establish his own authority over the remains of an empire where traditional imperial authority had disintegrated. There was no one to prevent him from rewriting the history of Church doctrine as if the emperors had never played a part in it. Popes were now assumed to have control over emperors, a reversal of the political realities of the fourth century. It is simplistic to talk of the Greek tradition of rational thought being suppressed by Christians and much more realistic to argue the suppression took place at the hands of a state supported by a church which it itself had politicized. The church of Constantine and his successors, embedded as it was in the stressed environment of the late empire, was radically different from that of earlier times. The resultant suppression of independent rational thought led to an extinction of serious mathematical and scientific thinking in Europe for a thousand years.

Finis.