Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (29 page)

By the late second century, intelligent non-Christians had started to realize the significance of this self-confidence. Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment, an establishment which had never felt thus threatened by the teeming ancient cults of the provinces, or even by Judaism. Christianity had no national base; it was as open to those who wished to work hard to enter it as Roman citizenship itself. It talked much of new covenant, new law, amid all its selective annexation of a Jewish past. Was it really trying to create a new citizenship for its own purposes, to create an empire within an empire? This was certainly the opinion of one well-educated late-second-century traditionalist called Celsus, who wrote a bitter attack on Christianity, probably somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. This has been preserved for us only because it is embedded in the text of a Christian answer written by Origen some seventy years later - a useful recurrent accident in the history of Christian polemic which has preserved many texts which would otherwise have disappeared.
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Celsus felt that certainty was unattainable in religious matters, but he loved the old gods of Rome because they were the pillars of the society which he loved. Probably aware of Justin Martyr's claims for Christianity's antiquity, he emphasized its novelty among religions. He deplored the superstition of Eastern mystery cults as much as he deplored Christian stupidity in paying divine honours to a recently executed Palestinian carpenter. Yet if Christian belief was stupid, it was particularly dangerous because of its worldwide coherence: it was a conspiracy, and one which Celsus saw as especially aimed at impressionable young people. The result of Christian propaganda would be to leave the emperor defenceless, 'while earthly things would come into the power of the most lawless and savage barbarians.'
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THIRD-CENTURY IMPERIAL CRISIS

When Celsus wrote these words, about 180, they would have had a new and terrible significance for his Roman readers. During the second century, the empire ceased to expand; it reached its maximum extent under the Emperor Trajan (reigned 98-117), who annexed new territories in what are now Romania and Iraq. After that, the people on the frontiers began pushing back, which meant that Roman emperors from now onwards faced a constant battle to keep their borders secure. Over many centuries, people after people pushed westwards from the interior of Asia, and now a new phase in this long process caused disruption among the tribes in central Europe, forcing them in turn to look westwards and southwards for refuge, inside Rome's territories. When the Danube froze in the winter of 166-7, it was a particular disaster for the empire, giving thousands of the Langobardi a chance to cross over and devastate Rome's central European provinces. On the eastern Roman frontier, matters became even more serious in the early third century. A new dynasty in Iran, the Sassanians, regained Iranian independence from their neighbours the Parthians, and they were determined to take revenge on the world of Greece and Rome for the humiliations inflicted on Iran centuries before by Athens and the Hellenistic monarchs after Alexander the Great (see pp. 35-40). The dynasty's founder, Shah (King) Ardashir, made his intention plain by additionally taking the name of the ancient Iranian king and conqueror Darius. In 260 Ardashir's son Shapur achieved the ultimate humiliation for the Romans by taking the Emperor Valerian prisoner in battle; Valerian died in captivity.
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All this might not have been so disastrous if the empire had contrived to remain united under capable rulers. Although more than one first-century emperor had been broken by the psychological strain of ruling the greatest empire in Western history and had descended into megalomania, the empire later enjoyed a succession of exceptionally able and wise rulers in the dynasties of the Flavians and Antonines (69-192). Then the last of the Antonines, Commodus, had reverted to the pattern of insanity and was eventually murdered by his mistress Marcia to stop him murdering her (she was a Christian, a circumstance which furnished the great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon with one of his best feline passages at Christianity's expense).
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From the chaos and civil war that ensued during 192 there emerged as emperor an army officer from North Africa, Septimius Severus. His sons who succeeded him on the imperial throne displayed his ruthless brutality without his political good sense, and from Septimius's death at York in 211 to Diocletian's seizure of supreme power in 284, hardly a single Roman emperor died a natural death. It was a terrible time for the empire: a mute tribute is how little we know about these decades.

The failure of leadership bred trouble throughout the political system. The short-lived Severan dynasty had been based on a military coup d'etat and so were most of the succeeding regimes well into the fourth century. Such emperors could not appeal to any traditional legitimacy and were therefore increasingly dependent of the goodwill of the army. 'Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men,' Severus urged his sons on his deathbed; they listened to clauses two and three of his advice.
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The army's needs, both in the constant frontier wars and in equally bitter civil wars, became all-important: to pay for the soldiers, taxation soared, and many people fled their towns and villages, turning to banditry. This in turn created a problem of internal policing which could be met only by reinforcing the army: a vicious circle. Misery was increased by rampant inflation, caused by reckless imperial currency debasement, and many parts of society reverted to a barter economy as a result.

It is a tribute to the strength of the Roman Empire that it survived the third-century crisis at all. Survive it did, unlike the Parthian Empire in its parallel crisis; indeed, in the East, there was still a Roman emperor more than a thousand years later. But the price of this survival was that imperial government became the ancient equivalent of a police state. This was intensified rather than remedied when Diocletian restored long-term stability to the economy and in some measure to politics after 284. All this spelled ruin for the delicate balance of city life which had been the basis of Classical civilization since the great days of the Greek
poleis.
Wealthy citizens had voluntarily accepted the round of civic office, seeing to the construction of beautiful buildings, roads, water supplies, bridges; it was a necessary demonstration of public spirit. Now few were willing to engage in such undertakings, and the imperial authorities had either to force people to take on public office or to send in their own bureaucrats to do the work with the backing of troops. A melancholy symptom of the new situation was the fact that when third-century Roman cities showed energy in building, it was often to put up defensive city walls, partly constructed out of civic buildings torn down for the purpose. Archaeologists have noted a particularly sinister feature of many of these new schemes of fortification: they enclosed only part of the city, the official headquarters and the wealthy areas. The old spirit of civic solidarity had withered.
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The end of the autonomous culture of the
polis
had profound consequences for religion. Traditional cults were linked with local identities: in towns and cities, with the self-government which had helped to sustain them. The decline of traditional religion can be measured through archaeology in smaller numbers of votive offerings at temples, falling temple incomes and, in some areas, an end to new votive inscriptions.
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Even without Christianity, religious culture would have changed. The usurping dynasty of the Severans set a significant pattern, bolstering their dubious regime by encouraging the identification of different territorial gods as facets of one supreme God, then identifying themselves with this single figure: Septimius Severus became particularly associated with the Egyptian god Serapis, but he also allowed his emperor cult to be fixed on any other local god who might command reverence in a particular area.
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This new religiosity was not simply a matter of official cult or imperial pressure. The third century has been seen as an 'age of anxiety', when people were driven to find comfort in religion.
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The idea has been challenged, but the surviving writings of the literate elites do show a new interest in personal religion, remote from the traditionalist respect for the old gods and the cultured cynicism which in easier times had been the received wisdom for aristocrats like Celsus. The worship of the sun became steadily more dominant, a natural universal symbol to choose in the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean. So Christianity was not the only religion to talk of oneness, to offer strict tests for initiation or to expect the result of these to be a morally regulated life with a continuing theme of purification. The sun cult of Mithraism, imported from the East like Christianity, had this character, and it is not surprising that Christians felt a particular bitterness towards Mithras.
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Mithraism predated Christianity in its appearance in the empire, but the growth of Christianity now also made it possible to consider initiating a cult which would be a conscious rival to the Christian faith and which, in the fashion of Christians like Justin Martyr, might make an effort to combine ritual observance with a serious and systematic interest in the great questions of Classical philosophy. Christians had tried to engage philosophers; now philosophers would have to decide on their attitude to Christianity. At the beginning of the third century Philostratus, tame philosopher in the household of Septimius Severus's wife, Julia Domna, wrote a biography of Apollonius of Tyana, an austere, ascetic philosopher who had been born about the time of Jesus Christ's crucifixion. He presented Apollonius as a performer of miracles and a spiritual healer, like Christ, but Apollonius's story ended without crucifixion or suffering. After a spirited confrontation with the Emperor Domitian (also a bete noire of Christian writers), he had avoided the tyrant's rage through an unspectacularly discreet exit from the imperial Court. In contrast to this unfussy practicality, he later demonstrated extraordinary powers when he was able to enjoy watching Domitian's murder in Rome by long-distance vision in Ephesus. It hardly matters how much truth or fiction there is in Apollonius's biography (though the fictional element is very evident); it is valuable in revealing what someone in the age of Septimius Severus felt was the most admirable possible portrait of a philosopher, and it is also very striking that Philostratus never once mentions Christianity in his writing. Apollonius was intended to upstage Christ, and he excited fury among Christians - the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea wrote an attack on him a century later.
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Intelligent people were now regarding it as respectable to take an interest in the sort of wonder-working which Philostratus described Apollonius as practising. They were also increasingly drawn to forms of philosophy which wore a religious and even magical aspect. Stoicism lost the intellectual dominance which in the second century had led an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to become one of its most interesting and important exponents. Now the intellectual fashion was for Neoplatonism, a development from Plato's thought which emphasized its religious character. The greatest Neoplatonist teacher was Plotinus (
c
. 205-70). Accounts of him include what seems the first recognizable description in Western history of acute dyslexia, which probably explains why he was a reluctant writer; his inspirational oral teachings were mediated to a rapidly growing circle of admiring intellectuals through his somewhat self-important biographer and editor Porphyry, who published Plotinus's works at the beginning of the fourth century.
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Plotinus was a younger contemporary of Origen in the advanced schools of Alexandria and his picture of the supreme God has resemblances to Origen's. He spoke in a trinitarian fashion of a divine nature consisting of an ultimate One, of Intelligence and of the Soul. The first represented absolute perfection, the second was an image of the first but was capable of being known by our inferior senses, and the third was a spirit which infused the world and was therefore capable of being diverse, in contrast to the perfection of the One and of Intelligence. In this scheme, there was no Christ figure to be incarnate; it was the task of the individual soul by ecstatic contemplation of the divine to restore the harmony lost in the world, an ecstasy so rare that Plotinus himself admitted to achieving it only four times in his life. Neoplatonism was largely independent of the old religious forms, though it could coexist perfectly happily with traditional gods, by enrolling them as manifestations of Intelligence. Porphyry's writings encouraged this tendency, which was yet another force uniting the religions of the Mediterranean. Christian thinkers over many centuries were not exempt from the fascination of Neoplatonism, and we will repeatedly encounter its effects.

Christianity faced an equally powerful challenge from a new religion with the same Semitic background from which it had itself emerged, in the teachings of a new prophet called Mani. He was born around 216 near Seleucia-Ctesiphon, capital of the increasingly troubled and feeble Parthian Empire, of whose ruling house he was a minor relative. As a boy he witnessed the Parthians fall to the Persians, but he managed initially to gain favour from the new rulers before they turned against him and threw him in prison, where he died in 276 or 277. His travels, meanwhile, had taken him as far as India, at much the same time as Syriac Christianity was also gaining a foothold in the East; he encountered Buddhism and Hinduism to range alongside his previous knowledge of Christianity in both its gnostic and its Catholic varieties. Maybe it was his consciousness of the collapse of his family's world which prompted Mani to create a new synthesis of all the religions which bordered his homeland. Clearly there was a demand for such syntheses in societies full of myriad cross-cultural encounters, because his efforts attracted huge success.