Meanwhile, the spread of the third great global faith, Buddhism, stuttered and stopped. One of the great unanswered questions is, ‘Why?’ In the third century bce, when Buddhist scriptures were codified, Ashoka’s empire (where, as we have seen, Buddhism was in effect the state religion) might have become a springboard for further expansion, just as the Roman Empire was for Christianity or the caliphate of the seventh and eighth centuries for Islam. During what we think of as the early Middle Ages, when Christendom and Islam stretched to gigantic proportions, Buddhism demonstrated similar elasticity. It became the major influence on the spirituality of Japan. It colonized much of South-East Asia. It acquired a huge following in China, where some emperors favoured it so much that it might have taken over the Chinese court and become an imperial religion in the world’s mightiest state. Yet nothing of the sort happened. In China, Taoist and Confucian establishments kept Buddhism at bay. Buddhist clergy never captured the lasting allegiance of states, except eventually in relatively small, marginal places such as Burma, Thailand, and Tibet. Elsewhere, Buddhism continued to make big contributions to culture, but in much of India and parts of Indochina, Hinduism displaced or confined it, while in the rest of Asia, wherever new religions successfully challenged pagan traditions, Christianity and Islam grew where Buddhism stagnated or declined. Not until the late sixteenth century, thanks to the patronage of a Mongol khan, did Buddhism resume expansion in Central Asia.9 Only in the twentieth century (for reasons we shall come to in their place) did it compete with Christianity and Islam worldwide.
The story of this chapter is therefore a Christian and Muslim story. It is Christian more than Muslim, because in the long run Christianity demonstrated greater cultural adaptability – greater flexibility in self-redefinition to suit different peoples at different times in different places. Islam, as apologists usually present it, is a way of life with strong prescriptions about society, politics, and law – highly suitable for some societies but unworkable in others. Recent migrations have extended the reach of Islam to previously untouched regions; in the case of North America, the rediscovery of their supposed Islamic roots by some people of slave ancestry has helped. For most of its past, however, Islam was largely confined to a fairly limited belt of the Old World, in a region of somewhat consistent cultures and environments, from the edges of the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere to the tropics.10 Christianity is less prescriptive. Its more malleable code is better equipped to penetrate just about every kind of society in just about every habitable environment. Each adjustment has changed Christian tradition, admitting or arousing many new ideas.
Redefining God: The Unfolding of Christian Theology
The first task, or one of the first, for religious people who want to extend their creed’s appeal is to propose a believable God, adjusted to the cultures of potential converts. Followers of Christ and Muhammad represented their teachings as divine: in Christ’s case because he was God, in Muhammad’s because God privileged him as the definitive prophet. Yet, if they were to grow and endure, both religions had to respond to earlier, pagan traditions, and win over elites schooled in classical learning. Both, therefore, faced the problem of reconciling immutable and unquestionable scriptures with other guides to truth, especially reason and science.
For Christian thinkers, the task of defining doctrine was especially demanding, because Christ, unlike Muhammad, left no writings of his own. The Acts of the Apostles and the letters that form most of the subsequent books of the New Testament show orthodoxy struggling for utterance: was the Church Jewish or universal? Was its doctrine confided to all the apostles or only some? Did Christians earn salvation, or was it conferred by God irrespective of personal virtue? Most religions misleadingly present adherents with a checklist of doctrines, which they usually ascribe to an authoritative founder, and invite or defy dissent. In reality, however – and manifestly in the case of Christianity – heresy normally comes first: orthodoxy is refined out of competing opinions.11
Some of the most contentious issues in early Christianity concerned the nature of God: a successful formula had to fit in God’s three Persons, designated by the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without violating monotheism. Fudge was one way of getting round the problems, as in the creed of St Athanasius, which most Christians still endorse and which bafflingly defines the Persons of the Trinity as ‘not three incomprehensibles but … one incomprehensible’. On the face of it, other Christian doctrines of God seem equally inscrutable and absurd: that He should have, or in some sense be, a Son, born of a virgin; that the Son should be both fully God and fully human; that He should be omnipotent, yet self-sacrificing, and perfect, yet subject to suffering; that His sacrifice should be unique in time and yet perpetual; that He should have truly died and yet survived death; and that His earthly presence, in flesh and blood, should be embodied in the Church. Theologians took a long time to work out appropriate formulae that are consistent and, to most minds, on most of the contentious points, reasonable. The Gospel writers and St Paul seem to have sensed that Christ participated, in a profound and peculiar way, in the nature of God. St John’s Gospel does not just tell the story of a human son of God or even of a man who represented God to perfection, but of the incarnate Logos: the thought or reason that existed before time began. Sonhood was a metaphor expressing the enfleshment of incorporeal divinity. But early Christians’ efforts to explain this insight were ambiguous, vague, or clouded by affected mystery. Over the next two or three centuries, by making the incarnation intelligible, theology equipped Christianity with a God who was appealing (because human), sympathetic (because suffering), and convincing (because exemplified in everyone’s experience of human contact, compassion, and love).
To understand how they did it, context helps. Christianity is definable as the religion that claims a particular, historic person as God incarnate. But the idea that a god might take flesh was well known for thousands of years before the time of Christ. Ancient shamans ‘became’ the gods whose attributes they donned. Egyptian pharaohs were gods, in the peculiar sense we have seen (see here). Myths of divine kings and gods in human guise are common. The Buddha was more than human in the opinion of some of his followers: enlightenment elevated him to transcendence. Anthropologists with a sceptical attitude to Christianity, from Sir James Frazer in the nineteenth century to Edmund Leach in the late twentieth, have found scores of cases of incarnation, often culminating in a sacrifice of the man-god similar to Christ’s own.12 In the fourth century, a comparable Hindu idea surfaced: Vishnu had various human lives, encompassing conception, birth, suffering, and death. Islamic (or originally Islamic) sects, especially in Shiite traditions, have sometimes hailed Ali as a divine incarnation or adopted imams or heroes in the same role.13 The Druzes of Lebanon hail as the living Messiah the mad eleventh-century Caliph al-Hakim, who called himself an incarnation of God. The Mughal emperor Akbar focused worship on himself in the religion he devised in the sixteenth century in an attempt to reconcile the feuding faiths of his realm.
So how new was the Christian idea? If it was ever unique, did it remain so?
In all the rival cases, as in the many reincarnations of gods and Buddhas that strew the history of South, East, and Central Asia, a spirit ‘enters’ a human body – variously before, at, and after birth. But in the Christian idea, the body itself was divinized: outside Christian tradition, all recorded incarnations either displace humanity from the divinized individual, or invest him or her with a parallel, godly nature. In Christ, on the other hand, human and divine natures fused, without mutual distinction, in one person. ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’, in the memorable formula of the opening chapter of St John’s Gospel, ‘and we have seen His glory … full of grace and truth’.
Orthodox Christian theology has always insisted on this formula against heretics who want to make Christ merely divine, or merely human, or to keep his human and divine natures separate. The doctrine really is peculiarly Chri
stian – which is why the Church has fought so hard to preserve it. The idea has inspired imitators: a constant stream of so-called Messiahs claimed the same attributes or were credited with them by their supporters. But the Christian understanding of the incarnation of God seems to be an un-recyclable idea. Since Christ, no claimant has ever convinced large numbers of people, all over the world.14
In the long run, Christian theologians were remarkably successful in alloying Jewish wisdom, which had percolated through Christianity’s long pedigree, with ancient Greek and Roman ideas, crafting reasonable religion, which tempered the hard, brittle God of the Old Testament – remote, judgemental, ‘jealous’, and demanding – with supple philosophizing. The outcome encumbered the Church with one big disadvantage: a perplexingly complex theology, which excludes those who do not understand it and divides those who do. In the early fourth century, a council of bishops and theologians, under the chairmanship of a Roman emperor, devised a formula for overcoming that problem, or, at least, an idea which, without solving all the problems, established the framework in which they all had to fit. The Council of Nicaea formulated the creed to which most communities that call themselves Christian still subscribe. Its word for the relationship of Father and Son was homoousion, traditionally translated as ‘consubstantial’ and rather inaccurately rendered in some modern translations as ‘of one being’ or ‘of one nature’. The formula ruled out suggestions that might weaken the Christian message: for instance, that Christ was God only in some metaphorical sense; or that his sonship should be taken literally; or that his humanity was imperfect or his suffering illusory. Christians continued to disagree about how the Holy Spirit should fit into the picture; but the homoousion idea effectively fixed the limits of debate on that issue, too. The shared identity of Father and Son had to embrace the Holy Spirit. ‘The Divine Word’, as Pope Dionysius had said in the late third century, ‘must be one with the God of the Universe and the Holy Spirit must abide and dwell in God, and so it is necessary that the Divine Trinity be gathered and fused in unity.’15
Who thought of the homoousion idea? The word was one of many bandied about among theologians of the period. According to surviving accounts of the Council, the Roman emperor, Constantine, made the decision to adopt it officially and incontrovertibly. He called himself ‘apostle-like’ and, at his own insistence, presided over the council. He was a recent, theologically illiterate convert to Christianity. But he was an expert power broker who knew a successful negotiating formula when he saw one.
Preachers echoed the theologians, elaborating folksy images of the inseparably single nature of the persons of the Trinity. The most famous were St Patrick’s shamrock – one plant, three leaves; one nature, three persons – and the clay brick, made of earth, water, and fire, that St Spyridon crushed in the sight of his congregation. It miraculously dissolved into its constituent elements. Most Christians have probably relied on such homely images for making sense of convoluted doctrines.16
Religions as Societies: Christian and Muslim Ideas
Theological subtleties, on the whole, do not put bums on seats. Most people do not rate intellect highly and do not, therefore, demand intellectually convincing religions: rather, they want a sense of belonging. Christ provided the Church with a way of responding. At supper on the eve of his death he left his fellow-diners with the idea that collectively they could perpetuate his presence on Earth. According to a tradition reliably recorded by St Paul soon after the event, and repeated in the Gospels, he suggested that he would be present in flesh and blood whenever his followers met to share a meal of bread and wine. In two ways the meal signified the founder’s perpetual embodiment. First, in worship, the body and blood of Christ, respectively broken and spilled, were reunified when shared and ingested. Second, the members of the Church represented themselves as the body of Christ, spiritually reconstituted. He was, as he said, ‘with you always’ in the consecrated bread and in those who shared it.17 ‘As there is one bread’, in St Paul’s way of putting it, ‘so we, although there are many of us, are one single body, for we all share in the one bread.’ This was a new way of keeping a sage’s tradition alive. Previously sages had nominated or adopted key initiates as privileged custodians of doctrine, or, in the case of the Jews, custodianship belonged to an entire but strictly limited ‘chosen people’.
Christ used both these methods for transmitting teachings: he confided his message to a body of apostles, whom he selected, and to Jewish congregations who regarded him as the long-prophesied Messiah. Over the course of the first few Christian generations, however, the religion embraced increasing numbers of Gentiles. A new model was needed: that of the Church, which embodied Christ’s continuing presence in the world and which spoke with his authority. Leaders, called overseers or (to use the anglicized word that means the same thing) bishops, were chosen by ‘apostolic succession’ to keep the idea of a tradition of apostleship alive. Rites of baptism, meanwhile, which guaranteed a place among God’s elect (literally those chosen for salvation), sustained in Christian communities a sense of belonging to a chosen people. After the Romans destroyed the temple of Jerusalem in 70 ce, Christians strengthened their claim as stewards of Jewish tradition by adopting many of the temple rites of sacrifice: in some ways, you get more of a sense of what ancient Jewish worship was like in an old-fashioned church than in a modern synagogue.
In terms of appeal and durability, the Church has been one of the most successful institutions in the history of the world, surviving persecution from without and schisms and shortcomings from within. So the idea worked. But it was problematic. Baptism as a guarantee of preferential treatment in the eyes of God is hard to reconcile with the notion, equally Christian, or more so, of a universally benign deity who desires salvation for everybody. Theoretically, the Church was the united body of Christ; in practice Christians were always divided over how to interpret his will. Schismatics challenged and rejected efforts to preserve consensus. Many of the groups that seceded from the Church from the time of the Reformation onwards questioned or modified the notion of collective participation in sacraments of unity, sidestepping the Church with direct appeals to scripture, or emphasizing individual relationships with God, or insisting that the real Church consisted of the elect known to him alone.
In some ways, Islam’s alternative seems more attractive to potential converts from most forms of paganism. A simple device, uncluttered with Christians’ complicated theology and cumbersome creeds, signifies Muslims’ common identity: the believer makes a one-line profession of faith and performs a few simple, albeit demanding, rituals. But demanding rites constitute encumbrances for Islam: circumcision, for instance, which is customary and, in most Islamic communities, effectively unavoidable, or exigent routines of prayer, or restrictive rules of dietary abstinence. Although Christianity and Islam have been competing on and off for nearly a millennium and a half, it is still too early to say which works better, in terms of ever-widening appeal. Despite phases of stupendous growth, Islam has never yet matched the global range of cultures and natural environments that have nourished Christianity.
Moral Problems
As a toolkit for spreading religion, theology and ecclesiology are incomplete: you also need a system of ethics strong enough to persuade audiences that you can benefit believers and improve the world. Christians and Muslims responded to the challenge in contrasting but effective ways.
Take Christian morals first. St Paul’s most radical contribution to Christianity was also his most inspiring and most problematic idea. He has attracted praise or blame for creating or corrupting Christianity. The ways in which he developed doctrine might have surprised Christ.18 But whether or not he captured his master’s real thinking when he expressed the idea of grace (see here), he projected an indelible legacy. God, he thought, grants salvation independently of recipients’ deserts. ‘It is through grace that you have been saved’, he wrote to the Ephesians – not, as he constantly averred, through a
ny merit of one’s own. In an extreme form of the doctrine, which Paul seems to have favoured at some times and which the Church has always formally upheld, any good we do is the result of God’s favour. ‘No distinction is made’, Paul wrote to the Romans. ‘All have sinned and lack God’s glory, and all are justified by the free gift of his grace.’
For some people the idea – or the way Paul puts it, with little or no place for human freedom – is bleak and emasculating. Most, however, find it appealingly liberating. No one can be self-damned by sin. No one is irredeemable if God chooses otherwise. The value of the way a life is lived is calibrated not by external compliance with rules and rites, but by the depth of the individual person’s response to grace. A seventeenth-century play (El condenado por desconfiado, in which my actor-son once starred at London’s National Theatre) by the worldly-wise monk, Tirso de Molina, makes the point vividly: a robber ascends to heaven at the climax, despite the many murders and rapes of which he boasts, because he echoes God’s love in loving his own father; my son played the curmudgeonly, religiously scrupulous hermit, who has no trust in God, loves nobody, and is marked for hell. Confidence in grace can, however, be taken too far. ‘A man’s free will serves only to lead him into sin, if the way of truth be hidden from him’,19 St Augustine pointed out around the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. St Paul hammered home his claim that God chose the recipients of grace ‘before the world was made … He decided beforehand who were the ones destined … It was those so destined that He called, those that He called He justified.’ This apparently premature decision on God’s part makes the world seem pointless. Heretics treated the availability of grace as a licence to do what they liked: if they were in a state of grace, their crimes were no sin but holy and faultless; if not, their iniquities would make no difference to their damnation.
Out of Our Minds Page 21