by Harvey Cox
Another intriguing theologian of the time, Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 142–200), leaped into a currently feverish argument about how many gospels of the dozens then in circulation should be included in the New Testament canon. He advanced a creative line of reasoning. There must be four, he concluded, since there had been four faces in the vision of Ezekiel: a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (1:10). Although his logic may appear a little out of the ordinary today, he won his case. Not only are there only four gospels in the New Testament, but for centuries after him pilgrims and tourists have learned from their guidebooks to recognize these symbols as the ensigns of Matthew (an angel), Mark (a lion), Luke (an ox), and John (an eagle), usually without knowing their origin.
Ignatius and Irenaeus had definite ideas of how the young Christian congregations should be governed. Both authoritarians, they were hardly advocates of participatory democracy. Still, they respected the remarkable diversity of the churches and did not try to enforce any standardization. Despite their colorful lives and courageous deaths, however, their influence ultimately plunged Christianity farther down the slope toward creed and hierarchy. They were both complicated figures. The standard textbooks credit them for strengthening the early church to fight “heresy” by solidifying its hierarchical structure. But this is only part of the story.
Ignatius, himself a bishop, emphasized the sovereignty of the bishop’s office. And Irenaeus took the next momentous step—combining the idea of the centrality of the bishop with apostolic succession. For my teachers, again, this seemed to have been a steady, indeed almost inevitable, development. But when one rereads these venerated writers against the backdrop of the highly variegated Christianity we now know existed in the second century, they can be interpreted in a different way. There is no doubt that Ignatius embraced a strictly autocratic view of how a congregation should be governed. He would have little patience with today’s congregational meetings or parish councils. But, despite all his emphasis on the bishop as the sole leader, he also insisted that the unity of the congregation in love was of uppermost importance. Further, he never suggested he wished to impose a uniformity of belief on all Christians everywhere. He was concerned only about how individual congregations should be led.
For his part, although Irenaeus was even less the democrat than Ignatius and argued for an even more exalted view of apostolic authority, he was firmly opposed to excluding anyone, even “false prophets,” from the congregation. His writings also indicate that Ignatius noticed the beginnings of short statements of beliefs, proto-creeds, in congregations here and there, but he was not troubled by the differences among them. He saw no need for a universal binding creed. Still, by making apostolic succession the basis for the power of the bishops, he launched a practice that is still operative today, a fact driven home to me by my tête-à-tête with Cardinal Ratzinger (see Chapter 8).5
Clearly what most worried these leaders of local congregations was not “heresy.” Rather, it was those members of their flocks who continued to have visions and dreams, who felt God or the Spirit was speaking directly to them. Today we call such people “charismatics.” There are millions of them in Pentecostal churches and in other churches as well, all over the globe. At that time they were called “prophets,” but they were hardly a new problem. They were evidently already among the people Paul wrote to, but, like Irenaeus, Paul did not want them to be shown the door. He just reminded them that he, Paul, had also had heavenly visions and could also “speak in tongues” with the best of them. He insisted, however, that all such gifts and prophecies had to be subsumed under the law of love.
Neither Paul, Ignatius, nor Irenaeus solved the “pentecostal” problem. The tensions between ecstasy and order, between spiritual freedom and group cohesion, between mystics and administrators have persisted for the full two thousand years of Christian history. They show no sign of abating. Mystics always make prelates nervous, but it seems they are always with us. They have appeared and reappeared both within the Catholic Church and around its edges every century, sometimes to be banished, sometimes to be burned at the stake, and other times (after they are safely dead) to be canonized. Today, Pentecostals, whom sociologist Margaret Poloma aptly calls “main street mystics,” are by far the fastest-growing sector in world Christianity, and the ebullient worship of these “holy rollers” still upsets the more staid denominations.6 They are a living example of a new Age of the Spirit. Their animated worship and concern for the downtrodden and left-out people of the world provide a portrait of the current period’s transition out of the Age of Belief. We will return to them in subsequent chapters.
Also within today’s Roman Catholic Church a vigorous Pentecostal-like “charismatic” movement is growing in many places in the world, while bishops and popes watch apprehensively. But the issue today, as it was in the early church, is not about creed or belief. It was, and is, about order, an appropriate chain of command. Pentecostals and charismatics claim that the Holy Spirit speaks to them directly, without intermediaries. Naturally this worries the supporters of hierarchies, and since the defenders of order are by definition better organized than those they are trying to bring into line, they usually, at least temporarily, come out—literally—on top. It is they who make the rules and write the books. This is clearly what was happening in the second and third centuries, so we have to read Ignatius and Irenaeus remembering that their Christianity was only one variety among several that were abroad at the time. It was the one they were establishing and advocating. But there were others, and today’s followers of Jesus do not have to be restricted only to theirs.
During the third century, the trends that propelled Christianity from a loose network of local fellowships with no uniform creed, polity, or ritual toward a clerically dominated multinational corporation gained speed. As in any such conglomerate today, the leaders at the time increasingly demanded what they thought of as quality control and brand recognition. These trends were largely the work of a new clerical aristocracy, made up of bishops who asserted that they held the authority of the original apostles and constantly enlarged their powers until ordinary laypeople were almost entirely excluded from responsibility.
One particularly ominous expression of this seizure of power is a document that appeared in Syria sometime in the third century called the Didascalia Apostolorum. I still remember puzzling over this rambling text in a seminar. It is alleged to have been written by the original apostles, which, as scholars without exception today agree, it surely was not. The document exalts the bishops to nearly absolute power over the laity and bestows on them something close to semidivine status. It instructs laity that the bishop is “your high priest, teacher, mediator and, next to God, your father, prince and governor. He is your mighty king. Let him who rules in God’s place be given by you like honor…. [He] has received from God power over life and death.”7 This is a long way from Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and assuring them that they should refer to each other and to him as “friends.” It also seems a large step away from Paul’s warning the members of a congregation that the head should not lord it over the feet.
The celebrated third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria (185–254) also added his considerable weight to the inflation of the power of bishops. When I read Origen in seminary, I found him an absorbing, but somewhat pathetic figure. He was said to be the first genuine “theologian” in Christian history, and since I nurtured ambitions about becoming a theologian, that impressed me. But Origen lived a terribly sad life. His Christian father was martyred in 202, so he had to provide for his mother and six younger brothers. He was so avid about remaining chaste that, at least according to the fourth-century historian Eusebius, he castrated himself. He too praised martyrdom, but when his turn came, in 250, he was not killed; he was imprisoned and tortured. He never fully recovered.
Origen thought of himself as a very orthodox, very “catholic” theologian, but even though he is still hugely respected today, his ideas would hardly pas
s muster now in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For example, he did not hold that the Son was in every way equal with the Father, so—had he been present at the Council of Nicaea, eighty years after his death—he would certainly have been deemed a heretic. He held a somewhat spiritualized view of the Resurrection, which prevents him from being what American fundamentalists consider a “real Christian.” He thought, like present-day Mormons, that souls were preexistent and believed, like Nietzsche (and Hindus), that history moves in cycles. He also held that no one was ever eternally lost and that even Satan would one day be redeemed. Except for the fact that he lived eighteen hundred years ago, Origen might very well qualify as a “New Age” thinker.
Still, for all his intellectual creativity and the free-wheeling character of his reflections, Origen cemented another brick into the battlements of a creed-bound, hierarchical church. Although he rightly worried about the possibility of bishops abusing their divine authority, he nevertheless warned people that they were required to obey even unjust bishops. After all, their ordination had imbued them with an inviolable sacred quality that placed them on a higher plane.
Cyprian (d. 258), another third-century theologian, pushes the clericalization process a step farther. Born into a wealthy pagan family in Carthage, upon his conversion to Christianity he sold all his goods and gave the money to the poor. Eventually selected bishop of Carthage, he became an exemplary leader of his flock through trying times. During the persecution under the emperor Valerian he was beheaded in 258 CE. Sadly, however, Cyprian’s view of the power of bishops widened the class cleavage in the church and further decimated the role of the laity. Recalling Paul’s repeated calls for unity and concord within the congregations, Cyprian in his De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, gave the idea a new twist that would have surprised Paul. He stated that what was essential for Christian unity was unity among the bishops. Hence it was no longer the men and women within the congregations or even those in all Christian congregations who should love one another. The implication is that they may not be capable of it. Rather, it is the bishops who should love one another, since they now represent the whole Christian community.
Cyprian’s equation of the “church” with the clergy has lasted a long time. Until quite recently, when people spoke of “entering the church,” it meant becoming a clergyman. Not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) did the Roman Catholic Church modify its language to refer to the whole church as the “People of God,” but that message has yet to modify popular ideas about what the “church” is. In any case, by the end of the third century, the earlier more egalitarian fellowships were fading into a dim memory, and the imperial version of Christianity—with its princes and monarchs above and its common folk below—had won the day, at least among the elites.
The parody of Christianity that took shape in the fourth century was not only a radical subversion of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, albeit carried out in their name. It also resulted in an equally radical subversion of the original meaning of the word “faith.” Students of the history of language know that changing contexts alter the meaning of words, and this is what happened to the word “faith.” Along with the “imperialization” of the church and the glorification of the bishops, now “faith” came to mean obeying the bishop and assenting to what he taught. Faith had been coarsened into belief, and this distortion has hobbled Christianity ever since.
But the worst was yet to come. The skid from faith to belief, from trusting in God to assenting to propositions about God, was now under way, at least among the bishops. The stage was set for the denouement, when under Constantine and with the bishops’ fawning compliance the church and the empire would, in effect, amalgamate. The consequence of this ancient corporate merger would be the strenuous attempt of the emperor and the bishops to enforce a common creed: “This is what you must believe.”
CHAPTER 7
Constantine’s Last Supper
The Invention of Heresy
On February 17, sometime around the year 280 CE, a baby was born in the town of Naissus in Macedonia and given the name Flavius Valerius Constantinus. The circumstances of his birth and upbringing differed completely from those of another child born some two hundred and fifty years earlier in Bethlehem of Judea. Still (with the exception of the apostle Paul), Flavius—known to history as Constantine the Great—exerted an influence on Christianity second only to that of Jesus. The Macedonian child was the eldest son of Constantius I by his first wife, Helena. However, instead of fleeing to Egypt from a cruel king, as Jesus and his parents had to do, the youthful Constantine grew up in the palace. He had been placed in the royal court of the emperor Diocletian when his father attained the title of Caesar, and he probably witnessed the brutal persecution of Christians that took place in 303 CE.
As a young man he became a skilled military commander and led the Roman battalions in Gaul where, when his father died, his troops proclaimed him the new emperor. Back home in Rome, however, another claimant, one Maxentius, also craved the purple. To buy off Constantine, he offered him the chance to be emperor of Gaul. This was not enough for the ambitious young warrior, however, so he marched his troops back to Italy and defeated Maxentius’s armies in battle after battle. Eventually, with the culminating confrontation at the Milvian Bridge, Maxentius was killed, and Constantine marched into Rome at the head of his victorious legions to become the sole emperor.
Except for one incident, the battle at the Milvian Bridge would have been relegated to a historical footnote, just one more in the endless inventory of bloodlettings spattered across Roman history. However, according to the Christian historian Eusebius, who was also the emperor’s fervent admirer, Constantine claimed many years later that just before the battle he had seen a cross in the sky. It was fashioned, he claimed, out of a long spear with a transverse bar emblazoned with the words “In this sign conquer.” Constantine, the story goes, instructed his troops to stencil this emblem on their weapons, and he won the battle. As emperor, he then decreed that the cross, crowned with a triumphal laurel garland, should become the imperial standard.
Constantine did not describe this episode until decades later, and the account carries the overtones of campaign boiler plate. The Romans had always believed that invoking the gods was the only way to assure victory in war and that the most powerful deity would win. Constantine obviously believed this. Hardly a monotheist, he continued to venerate both the god of chance, Tyche, and the sun god, Helios, along with the Christian God, and he never bothered to be baptized until he was on his deathbed. Not quite an exemplary Christian, he was undoubtedly responsible for the murder of both his son and his mother. What can we conclude about his “conversion”? Was it cynical expediency? Was he merely opportunistic, just a canny politician? Or did he experience a genuine personal epiphany? Perhaps he just came to think that the God of the Christians was more potent than the other deities and therefore a useful ally in his endless wars. No one will ever know.
By and large Christian historians have either eulogized Constantine for seeing the light and refashioning a pagan empire into a Christian one or reviled him for corrupting a pure religion. My own view is that both verdicts focus too heavily on the emperor. Whether it was a love marriage or a mutual seduction, plainly both parties entered into it freely. If the liaison between church and empire was some kind of unnatural act, at least it was consensual, but a large share of the fault lies with the hierarchs of the Christian community, who had become infected with what a psychoanalyst might term “empire envy.” They coveted the potency imperial officials, especially in the army, wielded over those in their charge. They calculated that by allowing themselves to be merged into the empire, maybe they could benefit from that kind of clout as well.
As for Constantine himself, whatever the depth or shallowness of his piety, he acted for an understandable raison d’etat. For the Romans, the main purpose of religions (the word literally means “bonds”) was to hold a
people together. Religion provided social cement, and as the older religions declined, Constantine—always a realist—saw the need for something to take their place. He knew little about Christianity, but he knew—or thought he knew—what he, and his empire, needed.
Obviously we will never uncover exactly what went on in Constantine’s mind, but the results of his actions are clear. Suddenly Christianity was no longer just one religion among many in the empire. True, the other religions remained legal during his lifetime and—some historians claim—never really disappeared. Now, however, the religion of the Galilean was the chosen favorite of the emperor, and soon of the empire. The opportunistic wave of “conversions” this stunning reversal in imperial policy produced is easy to imagine. The cross, which had once functioned as an instrument of torture on which a Roman brigade had executed a radical Jewish rabbi and was then one of the signatures of a harassed and persecuted minority (another was the fish), now festooned the shields of the successors of the same imperial troops who had carried out the execution on Calvary.
The cross symbol also soon attained popularity among the upper classes, which hastily aligned themselves with the emperor’s new religion. Beginning in the middle of the fourth century crosses with laurel crowns began to appear on sarcophagi, often fixed to a cruciform imperial standard. Then, when Constantine’s mother, Helena, made her famous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and returned with a chunk of wood she believed was a piece of the “true cross,” what had once been one symbol among others of Christianity now became its principal emblem. It has remained so ever since.