by Will Durant
Despite such episodes, and the diatribes of preachers calling their congregations to perfection, we may accept the old belief that the morals of the early Christians were a reproving example to the pagan world. After the weakening of the ancient faiths had removed their frail support from the moral life, and the attempt of Stoicism at an almost natural ethic had failed with all but the best of men, a new supernatural ethic accomplished, at whatever cost to the free and dissolvent intellect, the task of regulating the jungle instincts of man into a viable morality. The hope of the coming Kingdom carried with it belief in a Judge who saw every act, knew man’s every thought, and could not be eluded or deceived. To this divine surveillance was added mutual scrutiny: in these little groups sin could with difficulty find a hiding place; and the community publicly reprimanded those members who had violated the new moral code with insufficient secrecy. Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents of murder;16 in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.17 The Church forbade with less success the attendance of Christians at the theater or the public games, and their participation in the festivities of pagan holidays.18 In general, Christianity continued and exaggerated the moral sternness of the embattled Jews. Celibacy and virginity were recommended as ideal; marriage was tolerated only as a check on promiscuity and as a ridiculous means of continuing the race, but husband and wife were encouraged to refrain from sexual relations.19 Divorce was allowed only when a pagan wished to annul a marriage with a convert. The remarriage of widows or widowers was discountenanced, and homosexual practices were condemned with an earnestness rare in antiquity. “So far as sex is concerned,” said Tertullian, “the Christian is content with the woman.”20
Much of this difficult code was predicated on the early return of Christ. As that hope faded, the voice of the flesh rose again, and Christian morals were relaxed; an anonymous pamphlet. The Shepherd of Hermas (ca. 110), inveighed against the reappearance, among Christians, of avarice, dishonesty, rouge, dyed hair, painted eyelids, drunkenness, and adultery.21 Nevertheless, the general picture of Christian morals in this period is one of piety, mutual loyalty, marital fidelity, and a quiet happiness in the possession of a confident faith. The younger Pliny was compelled to report to Trajan that the Christians led peaceful and exemplary lives.22 Galen described them as “so far advanced in self-discipline and . . . intense desire to attain moral excellence that they are in no way inferior to true philosophers.”23 The sense of sin took on a new intensity with the belief that all mankind had been tainted by Adam’s fall, and that soon the world would end in a judgment of eternal punishment or reward. Many Christians were absorbed in the effort to come clean to that dread assize; they saw a lure of Satan in every pleasure of the senses, denounced the “world and the flesh,” and sought to subdue desire with fasts and varied chastisements. They looked with suspicion upon music, white bread, foreign wines, warm baths, or shaving the beard—which seemed to flout the evident will of God.24 Even for the ordinary Christian, life took on a more somber tint than paganism had ever given it except in the occasional “apotropaic” appeasement of subterranean deities. The serious temper of the Jewish Sabbath was transferred to the Christian Sunday that replaced it in the second century.
On that dies Domini, or Lord’s Day, the Christians assembled for their weekly ritual. Their clergy read from the Scriptures, led them in prayer, and preached sermons of doctrinal instruction, moral exhortation, and sectarian controversy. In the early days members of the congregation, especially women, were allowed to “prophesy”—i.e., to “speak forth,” in trance or ecstasy, words to which meaning could be given only by pious interpretation. When these performances conduced to ritual fever and theological chaos, the Church discouraged and finally suppressed them. At every step the clergy found itself obliged not to generate superstition, but to control it.
By the close of the second century these weekly ceremonies had taken the form of the Christian Mass. Based partly on the Judaic Temple service, partly on Greek mystery rituals of purification, vicarious sacrifice, and participation, through communion, in the death-overcoming powers of the deity, the Mass grew slowly into a rich congeries of prayers, psalms, readings, sermon, antiphonal recitations, and, above all, that symbolic atoning sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” which replaced, in Christianity, the bloody offerings of older faiths. The bread and wine which these cults had considered as gifts placed upon the altar before the god were now conceived as changed by the priestly act of consecration into the body and blood of Christ, and were presented to God as a repetition of the self-immolation of Jesus on the cross. Then, in an intense and moving ceremony, the worshipers partook of the very life and substance of their Saviour. It was a conception long sanctified by time; the pagan mind needed no schooling to receive it; by embodying it in the “mystery of the Mass,” Christianity became the last and greatest of the mystery religions. It was a custom lowly in origin25 and beautiful in development; its adoption was part of the profound wisdom with which the Church adjusted itself to the symbols of the age and the needs of her people; no other ceremony could have so heartened the essentially solitary soul, or so strengthened it to face a hostile world.I
The eucharist, or “blessing” of the bread and wine, was one of the seven Christian “sacraments”—sacred rituals believed to convey divine grace. Here, too, the Church used the poetry of symbols to console and dignify the life of man, to renew at each step in the human odyssey the fortifying touch of deity. In the first century we find only three ceremonies conceived of as sacraments—baptism, communion, and holy orders; but already, in the customs of the congregations, the germs of the rest were present. It was apparently the practice of the early Christians to add to baptism an “imposition of hands,” whereby the apostle or priest introduced the Holy Spirit into the believer;28 in the course of time this action was separated from baptism and became the sacrament of confirmation.29 As the baptism of adults was gradually replaced by the baptism of infants, men felt the need of some later spiritual cleansing; public acknowledgment of sin passed into private confession to the priest, who claimed to have received from the apostles or their episcopal successors the right to “bind and loose”—to impose penances and pardon sins.30 The sacrament of penance was an institution capable of abuse through the ease of forgiveness; but it gave the sinner strength to reform, and spared anxious souls the neuroses of remorse. In these centuries marriage was still a civil ceremony; but by adding and requiring her sanction the Church lifted it from the level of a passing contract to the sanctity of an inviolable vow. By the year 200 the laying on of hands took the added form of “holy orders,” by which the bishops assumed the exclusive right to ordain priests capable of administering the sacraments validly. Finally the Church derived from the Epistle of James (v, 14) the sacrament of “extreme unction,” or last blessing, by which the priest anointed the sense organs and extremities of a dying Christian, cleansed him again of sin, and prepared him to meet his God. It would be the shallowest folly to judge these ceremonies in terms of their literal claims; in terms of human encouragement and inspiration they were the wisest medicaments of the soul.
Christian burial was the culminating honor of the Christian life. Since the new faith proclaimed the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul, every care was taken of the dead; a priest officiated at the interment, and each corpse received an individual tomb. About the year 100 the Christians of Rome, following Syrian and Etruscan traditions, began to bury their dead in catacombs—probably not for concealment but for the economy of space and expense. Workmen dug long subterranean passages at various levels, and the dead were laid in superimposed crypts along the sides of these galleries. Pagans and Jews practiced the same method, perhaps as a convenience for burial societies. Some of the passages seem purposely devious, and suggest their use as hiding places in persecutions. After the triumph of
Christianity the custom of catacomb burial died out; the crypts became objects of veneration and pilgrimage; by the ninth century they had been blocked up and forgotten, and only accident discovered them in 1578.
What remains of early Christian art is for the most part preserved in the frescoes and reliefs of the catacombs. Here, about 180, appear the symbols that were to be so prominent in Christianity: the dove, representing the soul freed from the prison of this life; the phoenix, rising out of the ashes of death; the palm branch, announcing victory; the olive branch, offering peace; and the fish, chosen because the Greek word for it, i-ch-th-u-s, formed the initials of the phrase lesous Christos theou uios soter—“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.” Here also is the famous theme of the Good Shepherd, frankly modeled on a Tanagra statue of Mercury carrying a goat. Occasionally these designs catch a certain Pompeian grace, as in the flowers, vines, and birds that decorated the ceiling of St. Domitilla’s tomb; usually they are the undistinguished work of minor craftsmen corrupting with Oriental obscurity the clearness of classic line. Christianity was in these centuries so absorbed in the other world that it had little interest in adorning this one. It continued the Judaic aversion to statuary, confused imagery with idolatry, and condemned sculpture and painting as too often glorying in the nude; consequently, as Christianity grew, plastic art declined. Mosaic was more popular; the walls and floors of basilicas and baptistries were inlaid with tesselated foliage and flowers, the Paschal Lamb, and pictures from the Testaments. Similar scenes were carved in rough relief on sarcophagi. Meanwhile architects were adapting the Greco-Roman basilica to the needs of Christian worship. The small temples that had housed the pagan gods could offer no models for churches designed to enclose whole congregations; the spacious nave and aisles of the basilica lent themselves to this purpose, and its apse seemed naturally destined to become the sanctuary. In these new shrines Christian music inherited diffidently the Greek notation, modes, and scales. Many theologians frowned upon the singing of women in church, or, indeed, in any public place; for a woman’s voice might arouse some profane interest in the ever excitable male.31 Nevertheless, the congregations often expressed in hymns their hope, thanksgiving, and joy; and music began to be one of the fairest adornments and subtlest servants of the Christian faith.
All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.
So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness. Nearly every convert, with the ardor of a revolutionary, made himself an office of propaganda. The roads, rivers, and coasts, the trade routes and facilities, of the Empire largely determined the lines of the Church’s growth: eastward from Jerusalem to Damascus, Edessa, Dura, Seleucia, and Ctesiphon; southward through Bostra and Petra into Arabia; westward through Syria into Egypt; northward through Antioch into Asia Minor and Armenia; across the Aegean from Ephesus and Troas to Corinth and Thessalonica; over the Egnatian Way to Dyrrhachium; across the Adriatic to Brundisium, or through Scylla and Charybdis to Puteoli and Rome; through Sicily and Egypt to north Africa; over the Mediterranean or the Alps to Spain and Gaul, and thence to Britain: slowly the cross followed the fasces, and the Roman eagles made straight the way for Christ. Asia Minor was in these centuries the stronghold of Christianity; by 300 the majority of the population in Ephesus and Smyrna were Christians.32 The new faith fared well in north Africa: Carthage and Hippo became leading centers of Christian learning and dispute; here rose the great Fathers of the Latin Church—Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine; here the Latin text of the Mass, and the first Latin translation of the New Testament, took form. In Rome the Christian community numbered some 100,000 by the end of the third century; it was able to send financial aid to other congregations; long since it had claimed for its bishop the supreme authority in the Church. Altogether we may count a fourth of the population in the East as Christian by 300, and a twentieth in the West. “Men proclaim,” said Tertullian (ca. 200), “that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world.”33
II. THE CONFLICT OF CREEDS
It would have been surprising if, in the multitude of relatively independent centers of Christianity, subject to different traditions and environments, there had failed to develop a diversity of customs and creeds. Greek Christianity in particular was destined to a flood of heresies by the metaphysical and argumentative habits of the Greek mind. Christianity can be understood only in the perspective of these heresies, for even in defeating them it took something of their color and form.
One faith united the scattered congregations: that Christ was the son of God, that he would return to establish his Kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in him would at the Last Judgment be rewarded with eternal bliss. But Christians differed as to the date of the second advent. When Nero died and Titus demolished the Temple, and again when Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem, many Christians hailed these calamities as signs of the second coming. When chaos threatened the Empire at the close of the second century, Tertullian and others thought that the end of the world was at hand;34 a Syrian bishop led his flock into the desert to meet Christ halfway, and a bishop in Pontus disorganized the life of his community by announcing that Christ would return within a year.35 As all signs failed, and Christ did not come, wiser Christians sought to soften the disappointment by reinterpreting the date of his return. He would come in a thousand years, said an epistle ascribed to Barnabas;36 he would come, said the most cautious, when the “generation” or race of the Jews was quite extinct, or when the Gospel had been preached to all gentiles; or, said the Gospel of John, he would send in his stead the Holy Spirit or Paraclete. Finally the Kingdom was transferred from earth to heaven, from the years of our life to a paradise beyond the grave. Even the belief in the millennium—in the return of Jesus after a thousand years—was discouraged by the Church, and was ultimately condemned. The faith in the second advent had established Christianity; the hope of heaven preserved it.II
Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history—which is to illuminate the present through the past—were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing Church, and which the Church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies. Gnosticism—the quest of godlike knowledge (gnosis) through mystic means—was not a heresy so much as a rival; it antedated Christianity, and had proclaimed theories of a Soter, or Savior, before Christ was born.37 That same Simon Magus of Samaria, whom Peter rebuked for “sim
ony,” was probably the author of a Great Exposition which gathered together a maze of Oriental notions about the complicated steps that could lead the human mind to a divine comprehension of all things. In Alexandria the Orphic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Neoplatonist traditions, fusing with the Logos philosophy of Philo, stirred Basilides (117), Valentinus (160), and others to form weird systems of divine emanations and personified “aeons” of the world. In Edessa Bardesanes (200) created literary Syriac by describing these aeons in prose and verse. In Gaul the Gnostic Marcus offered to reveal to women the secrets of their guardian angels; his revelations were flattering, and he accepted their persons as his reward.38
The greatest of the early heretics was not quite a Gnostic, but was influenced by their mythology. About 140 Marcion, a rich youth of Sinope, came to Rome vowing to complete Paul’s work of divorcing Christianity from Judaism. The Christ of the Gospels, said Marcion, had described as his father a God of tenderness, forgiveness, and love; but the Yahveh of the Old Testament was a harsh god of unrelenting justice, tyranny, and war; this Yahveh could not be the father of the gentle Christ. What good god, asked Marcion, would have condemned all mankind to misery for eating an apple, or desiring knowledge, or loving woman? Yahveh exists, and is the creator of the world; but he made the flesh and bones of man from matter, and therefore left man’s soul imprisoned in an evil frame. To release the soul of man a greater god sent his son to earth; Christ appeared, already thirty years of age, in a phantasmal, unreal body, and by his death won for good men the privilege of a purely spiritual resurrection. The good, said Marcion, are those who, following Paul, renounce Yahveh and the Jewish Law, reject the Hebrew Scriptures, shun marriage and all sensual enjoyment, and overcome the flesh by a stern asceticism. To propagate these ideas Marcion issued a New Testament composed of Luke’s Gospel and the letters of Paul. The Church excommunicated him, and returned to him the substantial sum that he had presented to it on coming to Rome.