by Will Durant
Arianism, overcome within the Empire, won a peculiar victory among the barbarians. Christianity had been first carried to the Teutonic tribes by Roman captives taken in the Gothic invasions of Asia Minor in the third century. The “apostle” Ulfilas (311?–81) was not quite an apostle. He was the descendant of a Christian captive from Cappadocia, and was born and raised among the Goths who lived north of the Danube. About 341 he was consecrated as their bishop by Eusebius, the Arian prelate of Nicomedia. When the Gothic chieftain Athanaric persecuted the Christians in his dominions, Ulfilas obtained permission from the Arian Constantius to bring the little community of Gothic Christians across the Danube into Thrace. To instruct and multiply his converts he patiently translated, from the Greek into Gothic, all the Bible except the Books of Kings, which he omitted as dangerously martial; and as the Goths had as yet no written language, he composed a Gothic alphabet based upon the Greek. His Bible was the first literary work in any Teutonic tongue. The devoted and virtuous life of Ulfilas generated among the Goths such confidence in his wisdom and integrity that his Arian Christianity was accepted by them without question. As other barbarians received their Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries from the Goths, nearly all the invaders of the Empire were Arians, and the new kingdoms established by them in the Balkans, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa were officially Arian. Conquerors and conquered differed by only an iota in their faith: the orthodox held Christ to be identical in being (homoousios), the Arians considered Him only similar in being (homoiousios), with God the Father; but the difference became vital in the politics of the fifth and sixth centuries. By this chance concatenation of events Arianism held its ground till the orthodox Franks overthrew the Visigoths in Gaul, Belisarius conquered Vandal Africa and Gothic Italy, and Recared (589) changed the faith of the Visigoths in Spain.
We cannot interest ourselves today in the many winds of doctrine that agitated the Church in this period—Eunomians, Anomeans, Apollinarians, Macedonians, Sabellians, Massalians, Novatians, Priscillianists; we can only mourn over the absurdities for which men have died, and will. Manicheism was not so much a Christian heresy as a Persian dualism of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; it thought to reconcile Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and was bitterly buffeted by both. It faced with unusual candor the problem of evil, the strange abundance of apparently unmerited suffering in a world providentially ruled; and felt compelled to postulate an Evil Spirit coeternal with the Good. During the fourth century Manicheism made many converts in East and West. Several of the emperors used ruthless measures against it; Justinian made it a capital crime; gradually it faded out, but it left its influence on such later heretics as the Paulicians, Bogomiles, and Albigensians. In 385 a Spanish bishop, Priscillian, was accused of preaching Manicheism and universal celibacy; he denied the charges; he was tried before the usurping Emperor Maximus at Trier, two bishops being his accusers; he was condemned; and over the protests of St. Ambrose and St. Martin he and several of his companions were burned to death (385).
While meeting all these assailants the Church found herself almost overwhelmed by the Donatist heresy in Africa. Donatus, Bishop of Carthage (315), had denied the efficacy of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin; the Church, unwilling to risk so much on the virtues of the clergy, wisely repudiated the idea. The heresy nevertheless spread rapidly in North Africa; it enlisted the enthusiasm of the poor, and the theological aberration grew into a social revolt. Emperors fulminated against the movement; heavy fines and confiscations were decreed for persistence in it; the power of buying, selling, or bequeathing property was denied to the Donatists; they were driven from their churches by imperial soldiery, and the churches were turned over to orthodox priests. Bands of revolutionaries, at once Christian and communist, took form under the name of Circumcelliones, or prowlers; they condemned poverty and slavery, canceled debts and liberated slaves, and proposed to restore the mythical equality of primitive man. When they met a carriage drawn by slaves they put the slaves in the carriage and made the master pull it behind him. Usually they contented themselves with robbery; but sometimes, irritated by resistance, they would blind the orthodox or the rich by rubbing lime into their eyes, or would beat them to death with clubs; or so their enemies relate. If they in turn met death they rejoiced, certain of paradise. Fanaticism finally captured them completely; they gave themselves up as heretics, and solicited martyrdom; they stopped wayfarers and asked to be killed; and when even their enemies tired of complying, they leaped into fires, or jumped from precipices, or walked into the sea.2 Augustine fought Donatism with every means, and for a time seemed to have overcome it; but when the Vandals arrived in Africa the Donatists reappeared in great number, and rejoiced at the expulsion of the orthodox priests. A tradition of fierce sectarian hatred was handed down with pious persistence, and left no united opposition when (670) the Arabs came.
Meanwhile Pelagius was stirring three continents with his attack on the doctrine of original sin, and Nestorius was courting martyrdom by doubts concerning the Mother of God. Nestorius had been a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia (350?–?428), who had almost invented the Higher Criticism of the Bible. The Book of Job, said Theodore, was a poem adapted from pagan sources; the Song of Songs was an epithalamium of frankly sensual significance; many of the Old Testament prophecies supposedly referring to Jesus alluded only to pre-Christian events; and Mary was the Mother not of God but only of the human nature in Jesus.3 Nestorius raised himself to the episcopal see at Constantinople (428), drew crowds with his eloquence, made enemies by his harsh dogmatism, and gave them their opportunity by adopting the ungallant opinion of Theodore about Mary. If Christ was God, then, said most Christians, Mary was theotokos, god-bearing, the Mother of God. Nestorius thought the term too strong; Mary, he said, was mother only of the human, not of the divine, nature in Christ. It would be better, he suggested, to call her the Mother of Christ.
Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, preached at Easter, 429, a sermon announcing the orthodox doctrine—that Mary is the true mother not of the Godhead itself, but of the incarnate Logos, or Word of God, containing both the divine and the human natures of Christ.4 Pope Celestine I, stirred by a letter from Cyril, called a council at Rome (430), which demanded that Nestorius be deposed or retract. When Nestorius refused, an ecumenical council at Ephesus (431) not only deposed but excommunicated him. Many bishops protested; but the people of Ephesus broke out into demonstrations of joy that must have awakened memories of Diana-Artemis. Nestorius was allowed to retire to Antioch; but as he continued to defend himself and demand restoration, the Emperor Theodosius II banished him to an oasis in the Libyan desert. He survived many years; at last the Byzantine court took pity on him, and sent him an imperial pardon. The messenger found him dying (c. 451). His followers withdrew to eastern Syria, built churches, established a school of learning at Edessa, translated the Bible, Aristotle, and Galen into Syriac, and played a vital part in acquainting the Moslems with Greek science, medicine, and philosophy. Persecuted by the Emperor Zeno, they crossed into Persia, opened an influential school at Nisibis, flourished under Persian toleration, and founded communities in Balkh and Samarkand, in India and China. Scattered through Asia, they survive to this day, still denouncing Mariolatry.
The last great heresy of this turbulent period, and the most momentous in result, was announced by Eutyches, head of a monastery near Constantinople. In Christ, said Eutyches, there were not two natures, human and divine; there was only the divine. Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, called a local synod which condemned this “Monophysite” heresy, and excommunicated Eutyches. The monk appealed to the bishops of Alexandria and Rome; Dioscoras, who had succeeded Cyril, persuaded the Emperor Theodosius to call another council at Ephesus (449). Religion was subordinated to politics; the Alexandrian see continued its war upon the see of Constantinople; Eutyches was exonerated, and Flavian was assailed with such oratorical violence that he died.5 The council issued anath
emas against any man who should hold that there were two natures in Christ. Pope Leo I had not attended the council, but had sent it several letters (“Leo’s tome”) supporting Flavian. Shocked by the report of his delegates, Leo branded the council as the “Robber Synod,” and refused to recognize its decrees. A later council, at Chalcedon in 451, acclaimed Leo’s letters, condemned Eutyches, and reaffirmed the double nature of Christ. But the twenty-eighth canon of this council affirmed the equal authority of the bishop of Constantinople with that of Rome. Leo, who had fought for the supremacy of his office as indispensable to the unity and authority of the Church, rejected this canon; and a long struggle began between the rival sees.
To perfect the confusion, the majority of Christians in Syria and Egypt refused to accept the doctrines of two natures in the one person of Christ. The monks of Syria continued to teach the Monophysite heresy, and when an orthodox bishop was appointed to the see of Alexandria he was torn to pieces in his church on Good Friday.6 Thereafter Monophysitism became the national religion of Christian Egypt and Abyssinia, and by the sixth century predominated in western Syria and Armenia, while Nestorianism grew in Mesopotamia and eastern Syria. The success of the religious rebellion strengthened political revolt; and when the conquering Arabs, in the seventh century, poured into Egypt and the Near East, half the population welcomed them as liberators from the theological, political, and financial tyranny of the Byzantine capital.
III. THE CHRISTIAN WEST
1. Rome
The bishops of Rome, in the fourth century, did not show the Church at her best. Sylvester (314–35) earned the credit for converting Constantine; and pious belief represented him as receiving from the Emperor in the “Donation of Constantine” nearly all of western Europe; but he did not behave as if he owned half the white man’s world. Julius I (337–52) strongly affirmed the supreme authority of the Roman see, but Liberius (352–66) submitted, through weakness or age, to the Arian dictates of Constantius. Upon his death Damasus and Ursinus contested the papacy; rival mobs supported them in the most vigorous tradition of Roman democracy; in one day and in one church 137 persons were killed in the dispute.7 Praetextatus, then pagan prefect of Rome, banished Uisinus, and Damasus ruled for eighteen years with pleasure and skill. He was an archaeologist, and adorned the tombs of the Roman martyrs with beautiful inscriptions; he was also, said the irreverent, an auriscalpius matronarum, a scratcher of ladies’ ears—i.e., an expert in wheedling gifts for the Church from the rich matrons of Rome.8
Leo I, surnamed the Great, held the throne of Peter through a generation of crisis (440–61), and by courage and statesmanship raised the Apostolic See to new heights of power and dignity. When Hilary of Poitiers refused to accept his decision in a dispute with another Gallic bishop, Leo sent him peremptory orders; and the Emperor Valentinian III seconded these with an epoch-making edict imperially confirming the authority of the Roman bishop over all Christian churches. The bishops of the West generally acknowledged, those of the East resisted, this supremacy. The patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria claimed equal authority with the Roman see; and the furious controversies of the Eastern Church proceeded with scant obeisance to the bishop of Rome. Difficulties of communication and travel combined with diversity of language to alienate the Western from the Eastern Church. In the West, however, the popes exercised a growing leadership even in secular affairs. They were subject in non-religious matters to the Roman state and prefect, and until the seventh century they sought the confirmation of their election from the emperor. But the distance of the Eastern and the weakness of the Western rulers left the popes pre-eminent in Rome; and when, in the face of invasion, both Senate and emperor fled, and civil government collapsed, while the popes stood unawed at their posts, their prestige rapidly rose. The conversion of the Western barbarians immensely extended the authority and influence of the Roman see.
As rich and aristocratic families abandoned paganism for Christianity, the Roman Church participated more and more in the wealth that came to the Western capital; and Ammianus was surprised to find that the bishop of Rome lived like a prince in the Lateran Palace, and moved through the city with the pomp of an emperor.9 Splendid churches now (400) adorned the city. A brilliant society took form, in which elegant prelates mingled happily with ornate women, and helped them to make their wills.
While the Christian populace joined the surviving pagans at the theater, the races, and the games, a minority of Christians strove to live a life in harmony with the Gospels. Athanasius had brought to Rome two Egyptian monks; he had written a life of Anthony, and Rufinus had published for the West a history of monasticism in the East. Pious minds were influenced by the reported holiness of Anthony, Schnoudi, and Pachomius; monasteries were established in Rome by Sixtus III (432–440) and Leo I; and several families, while still living in their homes, accepted the monastic rule of chastity and poverty. Roman ladies of wealth, like Marcella, Paula, and three generations of the Melanias, gave most of their funds to charity, founded hospitals and convents, made pilgrimages to the monks of the East, and maintained so ascetic a regimen that some of them died of self-denial. Pagan circles in Rome complained that this kind of Christianity was hostile to family life, the institution of marriage, and the vigor of the state; and polemics fell heavily upon the head of the leading advocate of asceticism—one of the greatest scholars and most brilliant writers ever produced by the Christian Church.
2. St. Jerome
He was born about 340 at Strido, near Aquileia, probably of Dalmatian stock, and was promisingly named Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius—“the reverend, holy-named sage.” He received a good education at Trier and Rome, learned the Latin classics well, and loved them, he thought, to the point of sin. Nevertheless, he was a positive and passionate Christian; he joined with Rufinus and other friends to found an ascetic brotherhood in Aquileia, and preached such counsels of perfection that his bishop reproved him for undue impatience with the natural frailties of man. He replied by calling the bishop ignorant, brutal, wicked, well matched with the worldly flock that he led, the unskillful pilot of a crazy bark.10 Leaving Aquileia to its sins, Jerome and some fellow devotees went to the Near East and entered a monastery in the Chalcis desert near Antioch (374). The unhealthy climate was too much for them; two died, and Jerome himself was for a time on the verge of death. Undeterred, he left the monastery to live as an anchorite in a desert hermitage, with occasional relapses into Virgil and Cicero. He had brought his library with him, and could not quite turn away from verse and prose whose beauty lured him like some girlish loveliness. His account of the matter reveals the medieval mood. He dreamt that he had died, and was
dragged before the Judge’s judgment seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, “Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” Straightway I became dumb, and [then I felt] the strokes of the whip—for He had ordered me to be scourged…. At last the bystanders fell at the knees of Him Who presided, and prayed Him to pardon my youth and give me opportunity to repent of my error, on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted upon me if ever I read again the books of Gentile authors. … This experience was no sweet or idle dream. … I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, and that I felt the bruises long after I awoke. … Henceforth I read the books of God with greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men.11
In 379 he returned to Antioch, and was ordained a priest. In 382 we find him in Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus, and commissioned by him to make an improved Latin translation of the New Testament. He continued to wear the brown robe and the tunic of an anchorite, and lived an ascetic life amid a luxurious papal court. The pious Marcella and Paula received him into their aristocratic homes as their spiritual adviser, and his pagan critics thought he enjoyed the company of women more than became so passionate a praiser of celibacy
and virginity. He replied by satirizing the Roman society of the age in ageless terms:
Those women who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyes with belladonna, whose faces are covered with powder … whom no number of years can convince that they are old; who heap their heads with borrowed tresses … and behave like trembling schoolgirls before their grandsons. … Gentile widows flaunt silk dresses, deck themselves in gleaming jewelry, and reek of musk. … Other women put on men’s clothing, cut their hair short … blush to be women, and prefer to look like eunuchs.… Some unmarried women prevent conception by the help of potions, murdering human beings before they are conceived; others, when they find themselves with child as the result of sin, secure abortion with drugs…. Yet there are women who say, “To the pure all things are pure…. Why should I refrain from the food which God made for my enjoyment?”12
He scolds a Roman lady in terms that suggest an appreciative eye:
Your vest is slit on purpose. … Your breasts are confined in strips of linen, your chest is imprisoned in a tight girdle … your shawl sometimes drops so as to leave your white shoulders bare; and then it hastily hides what it intentionally revealed.13