A Criminal History of Mankind (37 page)

Meanwhile, Constantius’s cousin Julian showed no desire to become emperor. He was a bookworm by temperament. This did not save him from being arrested and kept at the court of Milan for seven months, where his life was in continual danger. But he was so obviously harmless that Constantius finally allowed him to go to Athens to study. There he became absorbed in philosophy and lived as an ordinary student. And eventually Constantius appointed Julian to be Caesar of Gaul and the northern countries. There Julian showed himself to be a natural soldier and won some important victories over French and German tribes. But when he began to suspect that Constantius was changing his mind, and that he would be next on the list for assassinations, he decided to put up a fight and marched south with his army. The fight proved to be unnecessary; Constantius died before they clashed, and the bookworm Julian - like Claudius before him - became emperor of Rome.

Understandably, Julian did not feel particularly friendly towards the Christians, recalling the role of the Bishop of Nicomedia in the murder of his family. Being a philosopher rather than a statesman, he saw that Constantine had made a mistake in raising Christianity to the position of official religion of the empire. The proof was that the Christians were still denouncing one another as heretics and assassinating one another when the opportunity arose. Power had proved as dangerous to the Christians as it had to the Caesars. The gentle, neighbour-loving apostles of the man-god were becoming rather worse than the Jewish zealots who had caused so much trouble to the Caesars. During one squabble about rival popes in 366 A.D., their supporters fought in church and left behind a hundred and thirty-seven corpses. The historian Ammianus remarks mildly that ‘wild beasts are not such enemies to mankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred to one another’. So Julian decided to do what he could to restore the balance. It was not his intention to persecute, or even suppress, the Christians. He only wanted to make them stop squabbling and behave like Christians. So he summoned the various bishops who were denouncing one another and asked them to desist. He restored the rights of ‘heretics’ who had been banished and allowed them to return. He withdrew the special privileges enjoyed by Christians - such as tax concessions. He opened pagan temples and tried to bolster the morale of pagan priests, who were in a state resembling shellshock after half a century of Christian persecution. Julian was attempting to restore some of the old religious tolerance that had existed before Constantine had given the Christians the whip hand.

There was a yell of outraged indignation from the Christians, who immediately labelled him Julian the Apostate. Christian writers poured out blistering denunciations. One of these was the emperor’s old schoolfriend Gregory of Nazianz, to whom Julian had been helpful; in his epistles against Julian, Gregory had to find discreditable reasons for Julian’s kindness; he even accuses him of failing to persecute the Christians in order to deny them the glory of martyrdom.

It was unfortunate that, like Marcus Aurelius, this mild philosopher-emperor was unable to remain at home and devote himself to his literary works. The barbarians were still knocking at the door; he had only been emperor for two years when, on his way back from a successful campaign in Persia, he died from an infected lance wound. The Christians breathed a sigh of relief and went back to denouncing and killing one another, and to persecuting the pagans.

And, with the irony of history, Julian’s tolerance made the situation worse. In allowing ‘heretics’ to return home, he restored the anti-Arians to power (Constantius had supported Arius), and the Nicene view that Jesus was God the Creator eventually triumphed as a consequence. And so the quarrels and schisms went on. Winwood Reade says, with superb sarcasm in his book
The Martyrdom of Man
: ‘The bishops were all of them ignorant and superstitious men, but they could not all of them think alike. And as if to ensure dissent they proceeded to define that which had never existed, and which if it had existed could never be defined. They described the topography of heaven. They dissected the godhead and expounded the miraculous conception, giving lectures on celestial impregnations and miraculous obstetrics. They not only said that 3 was 1, and that 1 was 3; they professed to explain how that curious arithmetical combination had been brought about.’ But amidst all their own quarrels, they had no hesitation about persecuting pagans. The emperor Theodosius, a Spaniard who came to the throne in 379 after a quick succession of ‘barrack emperors’, issued an edict saying that all his subjects should be called Catholic Christians, and that the rest ‘whom We judge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas... shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative...’ The pagan writer Symmachus pleaded eloquently: ‘Everything is full of God. We look up to the same stars... What does it matter by what system of knowledge we seek the truth? It is not by one single path that we arrive at so great a secret.’ But the Christians emphatically disagreed.

It would, of course, be a crude oversimplification to say that the triumph of Christianity was a triumph for some of the worst elements in human nature. After all, the worst elements had already had it mostly their own way for over two thousand years, since the great wars that tore the Mediterranean apart. And they continued to have it their own way in spite of, rather than because of, Christianity. The Christian emperor Theodosius, for example, behaved exactly like all other ‘Right Men’ who have managed to acquire power; any kind of slight to his authority aroused him to a frenzy. The people of Antioch became increasingly restless at their burden of taxes, and their complaints were treated as rebellion by the governor. Finally, there was an explosion of popular fury, and statues of the emperor and members of his family were overthrown. A company of soldiers quickly restored order, but Theodosius was infuriated. He declared that Antioch was no longer a city but a village, suspended the distribution of corn, and ordered the examination of large numbers of citizens by means of torture. Most of them were sentenced to death. But one of the appointed judges went back to Constantinople to beg for leniency and found that Theodosius had already half-forgotten the affair. So, congratulating himself on his generosity, Theodosius bestowed his pardon, and basked in the praise of the grateful people of Antioch, who set up statues by the hundred.

The citizens of Thessalonica, in Greece, were less fortunate. One of their favourite charioteers had a homosexual affair with a pretty slave boy and landed in gaol. At the time the people were already angry about various repressions, and when their favourite charioteer failed to appear at the circus they revolted and murdered the garrison commander and some of his officers. This time, Theodosius’s rage had no time to subside; besides, he could not have the whole populace put to the torture. So the inhabitants of Thessalonica were invited to games in the circus - seven thousand of them - and then the doors were closed and the soldiers given the signal for a massacre. It took three hours, and at the end of that time all the citizens were dead.

Bishop Ambrose of Milan was horrified by news of the massacre. Theodosius was in Milan - which had been one of the empire’s capitals since the time of Diocletian - and Ambrose wrote him a letter declaring that he had seen a vision ordering him to excommunicate Theodosius until he did penance. Theodosius went to church to obey, but was met by Ambrose, who told him that he had to do penance in public. This was too much for a man of the emperor’s violent temperament, and he stayed away from church for some time. But Ambrose won in the end; Theodosius was obliged to remove his imperial robes in front of a crowded congregation and ask forgiveness for his sins.

The episode is certainly a dramatic illustration of the power for good that Christianity could bring to bear on a tyrant. But when we look into it a little more closely, it ceases to be a simple parable of good versus evil. Shortly before the massacre, the emperor had heard that Christian zealots in a town on the Persian frontier had burned a Jewish synagogue. The local bishop, who had allowed them to do it, was ordered to make restitution out of the church funds. Ambrose wrote an extraordinary letter to the emperor, declaring that to tolerate Jews was tantamount to persecuting Christians and that if he refused to change his mind he was probably damned. And when Theodosius came to church, Ambrose halted the Eucharistic Liturgy and directly addressed the emperor from his pulpit. Reluctantly, against his better judgement, Theodosius gave way.

At this point we become aware that the excommunication episode was not simply a matter of saintly virtue (Ambrose was later canonised) versus criminal egoism. In the matter of the restitution to the Jews, Ambrose was in the wrong, and Theodosius was behaving like a just and responsible emperor. All of which suggests that Ambrose was another Right Man, and that what happened is what usually happens when two Right Men meet head on: the weaker of the two concedes the point.

It would be easy to draw the moral from this, and other episodes of Christian intolerance, and conclude that the criminal streak in man found it as easy to express itself under Christian emperors and bishops as under Greek tyrants and Roman Caesars - in fact, in some ways rather easier. This would be inaccurate and unfair; for the great virtue of Christianity was that it remained actively self-critical. In fact, Christianity, like Hinduism and Buddhism, recognised that one of man’s chief problems is his egoism, and that the ego stands in the way of ‘enlightenment’. The moment the church became ‘established’, deeply religious men began to ask whether this was really what Christ wanted. That magnificent fervour of the early Christians, their ecstatic certainty of salvation through suffering, evaporated like morning dew. So the deeply religious did what they had done in Palestine long before Jesus: they withdrew into the solitude of the desert. The great ascetic movement began. It had first started as early as 285 A.D., in the reign of Diocletian, when St Anthony withdrew into the desert - for waterless places were regarded as the abode of demons, and therefore the best place for a saint to engage in the ‘unseen warfare’ of the spirit. And a century later, when the church could now offer an established position to the careerist, the ascetics fled to the wilderness in droves. They slept on sharp stones; they flogged themselves with knotted leather thongs; they took care not to scratch themselves when lice crawled through their matted beards. Some - like St Simeon - sat on top of high pillars for years; others chained themselves to rocks; others stood on one leg like an ostrich, or remained in strange acrobatic positions for so long that the nails became curved like claws and grew back into the flesh. Some were fortunate enough to have suffered for their faith - St Paphnutius the Great, who lived in the desert with St Anthony, had one eye plucked out and one leg hamstrung under the emperor Maximus; others inflicted the suffering upon themselves. It was St Paphnutius who converted the famous courtesan Thais of Alexandria and ordered her to do penance by being walled up for three years in a cell. In his delightful novel
Thais
, Anatole France was later to make fun of this episode, showing the ascetics as ignorant bigots who made the supreme error of directing their loathing at the human body and its sexual functions - in France’s version, Paphnutius himself is ‘de-converted’ and tries to lure Thais back into sin. But France’s view is superficial; he fails to grasp the underlying reasons why the Christians were suspicious of sexuality. And these are of immense importance for the understanding of human criminality.

We must note, to begin with, that in most of the early civilisations we have been considering - Greek, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and so on - woman was taken for granted as a kind of domestic animal, often rather less valuable than a cow or pig. As Shaw comments, man built civilisation without her permission, taking her domestic labour for granted as its foundation. Earlier cultures seem to have taken a more idealistic view of woman, if statues like the Venus of Willendorf can be regarded as evidence; they saw her as the incarnation of the earth-mother goddess. The priestesses of Greece and Rome are a remnant of this earlier attitude. But as man became domesticated, woman became a beast of burden: the water carrier, the maize-thresher, the bearer of children. As civilisation developed, it was the males who enjoyed its benefits: the baths, the gymnasia, the clubs, and the philosopher’s classrooms. The women stayed at home and looked after the children. This explains the high incidence of homosexuality in Greek, Roman and oriental civilisation; the men spent their leisure in one another’s company; they ate together and bathed together, and when spring made a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of love, they were more likely to settle on some good-looking youth than on a pretty girl; he had little opportunity to meet a pretty girl socially. In our unsegregated society, men and women have daily opportunity to size one another up. Ian Brady was in the same office with Myra Hindley for six months before he deigned to notice her; but because they were in each other’s company every day, they ended as lovers. In ancient Rome, the stock clerk and the stenographer would both have been male.

But as civilisation affords more opportunity for leisure, it is inevitable that woman ceases to be merely the household slave. She becomes, for example, the hostess - and we have seen the god Augustus hurrying his hostess off to the bedroom under the eyes of her husband. As soon as women are ‘on show’, men can watch them moving around, wait for the charming glimpse of thigh or naked breast, and lick their lips. ‘Women’s Lib’ began in imperial Rome; Tiberius had to pass edicts against patrician women who expressed their boredom with domesticity by going ‘on the game’. A series of empresses wound the emperor around their little fingers - from Augustus’s Livia, Claudius’s Messalina, Nero’s Poppaea, Marcus Aurelius’s Fausta, to the empress Theodora, a nymphomaniac prostitute who dominated the later emperor Justinian.