Europe: A History (42 page)
to explain why the void should have been filled by Christianity rather than by half a dozen other candidates. Of all the sceptics writing about the rise of the Christian Church, none was more sceptical than Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
contains on the one hand the most magnificent historical prose in the English language and on the other hand the most sustained polemic against the Church’s departure from Christian principles. He conducted what he called ‘a candid but rational enquiry into the progress and establishment of… a pure and humble religion [which] finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol’.
29
(See Appendix III, p. 1236.)
CRUX
L
IKE
the square, the circle, the triangle, the arrow, and the notch, the cross is one of the irreducible, primary signs that recur throughout human history. Sometimes called ‘the sign of signs’, it is used in science to denote ‘add’, ‘plus’, and ‘positive’. Owing to the crucifixion of Christ, however, it was adopted at an early stage as the prime symbol of Christianity.
The Cross is omnipresent in the Christian World—in churches, on graves, on public monuments, in heraldry, on national flags. Christians are baptized with the sign of the Cross; they are blessed by their priests with the sign of the Cross; and they cross themselves—Catholics and Orthodox in opposite directions—when they implore divine assistance or when they listen to the Gospel. Medieval crusaders wore the Cross on their surcoats. The Christian Cross can be found in any number of variants, each with a specific symbolic or ornamental connotation.
1
(See Appendix III, p. 1229.)
[DANNEBROG]
Yet pre-Christian signs have long existed in Europe alongside their Christian counterparts. Best known is the age-old
swastika
or ‘crooked cross’, whose name derives from a Sanskrit phrase for ‘well-being’. In ancient Chinese lore, it signified ‘bad luck’ when the hooks were turned down to the left, and ‘good luck’ when they were turned up to the right. In its Scandinavian form, it was thought to represent two crossed strokes of lightning giving light or two crossed sticks making fire. In its rounded Celtic form, common in Ireland, it was made to represent the sun.
2
It had several millennia behind it before the pagan Nazis chose a modern version of the
hakenkreuz
as their party emblem.
Another example of the transmission of oriental and non-Christian insignia concerns the
tamgas
or ‘pictorial charges’ of the ancient Sarmatians. The
tamgas
, which occasionally resemble some of the more simple Chinese ideographs, reappeared in the tribal signs of the Turkish tribes, who advanced into the Near East in early medieval times. By this route, they are thought to have contributed to the system of Islamic heraldry which western crusaders were to encounter in the Holy Land.
3
At the same time, they bear a striking resemblance to signs which emerged at a somewhat later period in the unique heraldic system of Poland. As a result, scholars have been tempted to speculate that the familiar claim about the Polish nobility being descended from ancient Sarmatian ancestors may not be entirely fanciful. Their so-called ‘Sarmatian Ideology’, their heraldic clans, and their remarkable cavalry tradition have all been linked to the long-lost oriental horsemen of the steppes. One hypothesis holds that Poland’s Sarmatian connection may best be explained as a legacy of the Sarmatian Alans who disappeared into the backwoods of Eastern Europe in the 4th century
AD.
4
(Sarmatian
tamgas)
(Polish heraldic clan signs)
Symbols can arouse the deepest emotions. When the International Red Cross was founded in 1863, few Europeans realized that its emblem could be other than a universal symbol of compassion. But in due course it had to be supplemented with the Red Crescent, the Red Lion, and the Red Star. Similarly, when a Christian cross was raised on the site of the former Nazi Concentration Camp at Auschwitz, it caused bitter controversy, especially among those who were not aware that the victims of the camp included large numbers of Christians as well as Jews. In 1993, nine years of accusations and broken agreements were ended with the creation of an ecumenical memorial centre.
5
[AUSCHWITZ]
The spread of Christianity was greatly facilitated by the
Pax Romano
. Within three decades of Christ’s crucifixion, Christian communities were established in most of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean. St Paul, whose writings constitute the greater part of the New Testament, and whose journeys were the first pastoral visit of a Christian leader, was largely concerned with the Greek-speaking cities of the East. St Peter, Christ’s closest disciple, is said to have sailed to Rome and to have been martyred there c.
AD
68. From Rome, the gospel travelled to every province of the Empire, from Iberia to Armenia.
The key figure was without doubt Saul of Tarsus (d. c.65), known as St Paul. Born a Jew and educated as a Pharisee, he took part in early Jewish persecutions of Christ’s followers. He was present at the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, in Jerusalem c.35. But then, after his sudden conversion on the road to Damascus, he received baptism and became the most energetic proselyte of the New Way. His three missionary journeys were the single most important stimulus to its growth. He met with varying success. In Athens, in 53, where he found an altar ‘To the Unknown God’, he was received with hostility by the Jews and with suspicion by the Greeks:
APOCALYPSE
P
ATMOS
is Europe’s last island, hard by the Aegean’s Asian shore. In the first century
AD
it was used as a penal colony for the nearby Roman city of Ephesus. It was a fitting place to compose the last book of the canon of Christian scripture.
The author of the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, was called John. He never claimed what later tradition assumed, that he was St John the Apostle; and neither his style nor his outlook matches those of the Fourth Gospel. He had been exiled for religious offences, and was probably writing between
AD
81 and 96.
The Apocalypse of St John the Divine records a series of mystical visions which, like Jewish apocalyptic literature of the same vintage, foretell the end of the existing order. The interpretation of its wondrous symbolism—of the Lamb, the Seven Seals, the Four Beasts and the Four Horsemen, the Great Whore of Babylon and the Red Dragon, and many more—has kept Christians puzzled and entranced ever since. The central chapters deal with the struggle with Anti-Christ, supplying a rich fund of demonology.
[
DIABOLOS
]
The concluding section, chapters 21–2, presents a view of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’:
‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.
And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things new. And He said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
And He said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’
1
(Rev. 21:4–6)
Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other-some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange Gods: because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to Areopagus, saying May we know what this new doctrine… is?… For the Athenians… spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing. (Acts 17:18–21)
He sojourned twice in more congenial company at Corinth, where he probably wrote the Epistle to the Romans. On returning to Jerusalem he was accused of transgressing the Jewish Law, but as a Roman citizen appealed for trial in Rome. He is generally thought to have perished in Rome during the persecutions of Nero.
St Paul’s contribution was crucial on two separate counts. On the one hand, as the Apostle of the Gentiles, he established the principle that the New Way was not the tribal preserve of Jews, that it was open to all comers. ‘There shall be neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond nor free.’ On the other hand, he laid the foundations of all subsequent Christian theology. Sinful humanity is redeemed by Divine Grace through Christ, whose Resurrection abrogated the Old Law and ushered in the new era of the Spirit. Christ is more than the Messiah: He is the Son of God, identified with the Church in His mystical Body, which is shared by the faithful through Repentance and the Sacraments until the Second Coming. Jesus was uniquely the source of its inspiration; but it was St Paul who founded Christianity as a coherent religion,
[
CHASTITY
]
The Jewish origins of Christianity have had lasting consequences, especially on relations between Christians and Jews. Following the Jewish Revolt of
AD
70, the Jewish diaspora began to spread far and wide through the Empire. Judaism ceased to be concentrated in Judaea, and ‘the People of the Book’ became a religious minority in many parts of Europe and Asia. For them, Jesus Christ was a false messiah, a usurper, a renegade. For them, the Christians were a threat and a menace: dangerous rivals who had hijacked the scriptures and who broke the sacred taboos dividing Jew from Gentile. For the Christians, the Jews were also a threat and a challenge. They were Christ’s own people who had none the less denied his divinity, and whose leaders had handed him over for execution. In popular legend, and eventually for a time in official theology, they became the ‘Christ-killers’.
The schism within the Judaeo-Christian tradition has been generated on both sides by intense feelings of betrayal. It was inevitably more bitter than the conflicts of Christians with other religions. It is an unresolved, and unresolvable, quarrel within the family. From the hard-line Jewish perspective, Christianity is by nature antisemitic; and antisemitism is seen as a Christian phenomenon
par excellence
. From the hard-line Christian perspective, Judaism is by nature the seat of the antichrist, a bad loser, the perpetual source of smears, blasphemy, and insults. Notwithstanding the doctrine of forgiveness, it is the hardest thing in the world for Christians and Jews to see themselves as partners in the same tradition. Only the most Christian of Christians can contemplate calling the Jews ‘our elder brethren’.
Christianity, however, did not draw on Judaism alone. It was influenced by various oriental religions current in the Empire, and especially by Greek philosophy. The Gospel of St John, which begins ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, stands in marked contrast to the other three gospels, where this manifestly Greek doctrine of the
Logos
is not present. Modern scholars stress the hellenistic as well as the Judaic context. Philo of Alexandria, a hellenized Jew who sought to reconcile the Jewish scriptures with Platonism, holds a prominent place in this regard,
[
DIABOLOS
]
CHASTITY
C
HASTITY
—in the sense of the permanent renunciation of sexual activity—was adopted by the early Christians as a central feature of their moral code. It was not unknown among the ancients, although Juvenal hinted that it had not been seen since ‘Saturn filled the throne’. It was practised by pagan priestesses, such as the vestal virgins of Rome, on pain of death, and in the Jewish world by some of the all-male sects. But it had never been upheld as a universal ideal.
Indeed, the wholesale pursuit of the virgin life had serious social implications. It threatened the family, the most respected institution of Roman life, and it undermined marriage. In a world where infant mortality was high, and average life expectancy did not exceed 25 years, the average household needed five pregnancies from each of its adult women to maintain numbers. Celibacy among adults seriously endangered the reproduction of the species.
Yet the Christians cherished chastity with unremitting ardour. From St Paul onwards, they increasingly condemned the ‘bondage of the flesh’. ‘For I delight in the law of God after the inward man,’ wrote St Paul. ‘But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.’
1
The appeal of these Pauline teachings can only be partly explained in terms of the life of the spirit demanding freedom from all worldly preoccupations. The belief in the imminence of the ‘Second Coming’ may also have played a part, since it was thought to have rendered procreation superfluous. Sexual orgasm was condemned because it involved the ultimate loss of free will. Many people believed that the character of a child was determined by the parents’ humour during intercourse. This created further inhibitions, since lovers would fear that impure sexual feelings might deform their offspring. Galen reports an erroneous medical notion to the effect that semen was produced from the froth of agitated blood. For men, sex was linked with physical as well as with spiritual disorder. For women, lifelong virginity was seen as the surest means of liberation from the tyranny of husbands and of traditional domestic duties. In general, therefore, sex was seen to be the mechanism whereby ‘the sins of the fathers’ were transmitted from generation to generation.
In August 386 there occurred in Milan one of the most famous conversions of a self-confessed fornicator. St Augustine’s
Confessions
provide a vital insight into the considerations involved in his acceptance of chastity. By that time, however, three hundred years had passed since St Paul. Established Christian communities were feeling the need to multiply.
Hence the secondary ideal of Christian marriage was revived alongside the primary ideal of Christian chastity. In this, marriage officially remained a stop-gap measure, a guard against lust and fornication for those too weak to abstain. ‘For it is better to marry’, St Paul had written to the Christians of Corinth, ‘than to burn.’
2
This ‘rout of the body’ continued to hold sway in the Middle Ages. The secular Latin clergy joined the monks in celibacy. The ‘Virgin Saints’ were universally revered. The cult of the Virgin Mary, immaculate notwithstanding both conception and childbirth, was given a status similar to that accorded to the creed of the Trinity. Christian ascetics practised every form of mental and physical restraint, self-castration not excepted.
The history of chastity is one of those topics in the study of
Mentantés
which best help modern readers to penetrate the mind of the ancients. It serves as a point of entry to what has been called ‘a long extinct and deeply reticent world’. The magisterial study, which traces the debates on chastity among the Church Fathers of both Greek and Latin traditions, does not comment on present-day sexual attitudes, which the early Christians must surely have seen as a form of tyranny. But it undertakes the task of every good historian—to signal the differences between the past and the present, where chastity, to borrow a phrase, is often seen as the most unnatural of sexual perversions. ‘To modern persons’, Peter Brown concludes, ‘… the early Christian themes of sexual renunciation, continence, celibacy and the virgin life have come to carry with them icy overtones… . Whether they say anything of help or comfort for our own times, the readers … must decide for themselves.’
3