Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  How did the Romans become the Italians? I hope this book as a whole will answer the question and demonstrate as well how an Italian vita nuova coursed beyond the borders of Italy and lifted other nations. But the overture to an answer—a kind of melodic sketch of the grand opera to come—lies in the obscure centuries that stretch from the initial Christianization of the pagan Romans through the dankness of the Dark Ages to the sprouting of a fresh and vibrant sensibility in the early twelfth century, which marks the beginning of the high Middle Ages. For the remainder of this Introduction, permit me to identify just a few of the buds that open tentatively between the fourth century and the twelfth, presaging the amazing rebirth of the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries that will be the subject of the rest of the book.

  In the early fourth century a new emperor, Constantine the Great, secured his position against all rivals and made himself into the first Christian to occupy the imperial throne. How Christian Constantine was is a matter of conjecture: he seems to have continued to pay homage to his father’s patronal god, the Unconquered Sun, and was not baptized till he lay on his deathbed in 337. But his Edict of Milan, issued in 313, established religious freedom throughout the empire and ended the persecution of Christians, which till that time had broken out occasionally like a recurring contagion, claiming lives and creating martyrs. Constantine, whatever his beliefs, was a practical military man who wished to eliminate unnecessary conflict of every kind and to rule as unified a populace as possible. In deference to Christian feeling, he proscribed the shameful ordeal of public crucifixion, which was known to have been inflicted on the Christian God-Man four centuries earlier and had remained till Constantine’s day a favorite Roman method of enforcing popular quiescence. He even made the detested cross his royal symbol—as unusual a thing to do as would be, say, a governor of Texas electing to wear a tiny electric chair or a poison-filled hypodermic needle on a chain around his neck.

  While Constantine was hardly a squeamish fellow, his dramatic contribution to the easing of punishment and the relaxation of retribution within the Roman state could only have far-reaching consequences. Throughout the empire, Christian bishops, politically suspect figures in the pre-Constantinian centuries, were now invited into partnership with state officials for the great Roman enterprise of maintaining law and order. They lost no time in pressing for further gains: the outlawing of the bloody games and murderous gladiatorial displays that the Romans counted as their chief entertainments. Soon enough the bishops would be petitioning for an end to all manifestations of pagan sensibility—public prayers and processions, nude athletic contests, the casual mixing of naked men and women in the baths, even philosophical dialogues between pupils and pedagogues (who were often pedophiles)—that had long provided Greeks and Romans with public spectacle and private diversion.

  The office of bishop (episkopos, Greek for “superintendent”), though an invention of the Christian church in the late first century, was modeled on the traditions of Roman government, heavily dependent on alpha males to apply the laws and keep the peace. Each bishop ruled over a “diocese”—originally a secular Greco-Roman term for a provincial administrative district. As time went on and Roman administration collapsed in Western Europe under the increasing pressures of incursions by Germanic barbarians, the bishop would often be the only Roman official left in a given locality capable of implementing a body of law and custom that could reestablish social peace and guide the new barbarian ruler (and the mixed population of Romans and barbarians that he now ruled) toward a rational political settlement.

  In the time of Constantine, however, the barbarian threat still sounded like faraway thunder. In addition to his lightly worn Christianity, Constantine would be remembered chiefly for his dramatic change of imperial residence. He didn’t care much for Rome, too huddled and pluriform for his tastes, so he established a New Rome in the small Greek city of Byzantium on the southwestern shore of the Bosphorus. It was an excellent choice, for the site commanded Europe and Asia on opposite shores, was virtually impregnable, yet stood wide open to trade. Though Western Europe began to fracture into a puzzle of barbarian kingdoms little more than a century after Constantine’s death, the Byzantine Empire would remain in the hands of Constantine’s successors for ten centuries more—till in 1453 Byzantium, now a golden capital called Constantinople, fell to the Turks, who called it Istanbul.

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  When Constantine left Old Rome, he left the old capital to the pope, who quickly took on imperial perquisites and donned imperial panache. The pope and his brother bishops,d however, would soon need whatever smoke and mirrors they could command to dazzle the barbarians in what was to become a centuries-long struggle. The withdrawal of the emperor, and with him a significant portion of his armed forces, from Western Europe meant that Italy and the other western provinces were far more exposed to barbarian assault than they had ever been before. At the same time, the barbarians just beyond the border of the empire were experiencing an exploding population and the ensuing famine conditions that would make their overflow into Roman territory inevitable. To some extent, the popes—the good ones, at least—would have no choice but to take on the role of emperor, certainly insofar as the protection of Italy was concerned.

  During the fourth century, however, the rumble of barbarian thunder could be ignored while Rome, gifted with lavish donations from the now-distant emperor, rebuilt itself into a Christian shrine, no longer possessing the living presence of the emperor but rather the saving relics of dead apostles and martyrs. Rome had long been deemed civitas aeterna, meaning that this marble-fronted colossus, its roots sunk in myth and legend, could never fail to rule the world. Now, under an elaborate program of church construction—to consecrate the bones of such slaughtered apostles as the New Testament figures Peter, Paul, and Priscilla and the grisly martyrdoms of such unyielding aristocratic ladies as Cecilia, Sabina, and Domitilla—the city was transformed into an earthly gateway to everlasting life, the Eternal City that it still is, focus for worldwide Christendom, font of ambiguous religious authority, and irresistible magnet for pious, free-spending pilgrims as well as for awed, if secular, tourists. From a Roman cleric’s point of view, worldly failure had been transmogrified into heavenly success; from a municipal accountant’s point of view, it was a very smart move.

  The atmosphere of ancient political power now combined with the spectacle of continuing religious authority; and it would prove an impressively durable, not to say fertile, combination. “Most great cities,” writes the Princeton historian Theodore K. Rabb, “get only one shot at a golden age. Rome is the chief exception, an Eternal City not least for having hosted repeated outbursts of remarkable creativity.” From Virgil to Cavallini, from Fra Angelico to Michelangelo, from Bernini to Fellini, outsized creative geniuses have flourished along the banks of the stinking Tiber, always managing to serve up from Rome’s cultural depths surprising delights to a bedazzled world.

  For centuries to come, the Italian church and the Byzantine emperor would continue to influence each other, even if at each interaction the distance between them seemed to lengthen and the wall separating the Latin West from the Greek East grew ever thicker and more impassable. But besides this gradual estrangement (with its lasting historical consequences),e there looms the more profound question of why the ancient Ecumene, East and West, turned Christian in the first place. Why did the classical Greeks and Romans abandon their ancestral altars, bury forever their old gods—mighty Zeus-Jupiter, shining Apollo, lust-inducing Aphrodite-Venus, bountiful Demeter-Ceres, darkly provocative Dionysos-Bacchus, and all those other age-old, larger-than-life presences—and turn in prayer to a bloody worm of a man nailed to a cross?

  Conventional analysis customarily points to Constantine as the catalyst for this remarkable conversion. Everyone, after all, knew that Christians were in the emperor’s good graces and that upward social mobility might now depend on being part of the Chri
stian club. Well, yes, that’s a fair enough description of what happened in the fourth century; but it hardly explains the position the church had already achieved by the time of Constantine’s accession. Over the course of three centuries Christianity had gone from being a minuscule sect of Judaism—itself a decidedly minor religion—to serving as the favorite whipping boy of psychopaths like the emperor Nero, to acting as a refuge for more and more disaffected Greco-Romans, whether runaway slaves, working-class artisans, housewives, or (at last) well-connected aristocrats.

  Christianity’s claim that all were equal before God and all equally precious to him ran through class-conscious, minority-despising, weakness-ridiculing Greco-Roman society like a charged current. It is no wonder, really, that the primitive church seemed an almost fairyland harbor to women, who had always been kept in the shadows, and to slaves, who had never before been awarded a soupçon of social dignity or political importance. What is truly remarkable is how many aristocrats joined the still-illegal Jesus Movement in the course of the second and third centuries. Unlike the well-born opportunists of the fourth century who joined in the train of Constantine and his family, the Christians of earlier centuries were, by and large, distinguished by their sincerity and courage. They were seekers after truth who had gone quite out of their way to find it and then held to it despite the many inconveniences and even dangers that membership afforded.

  There were no social scientists to count heads and take polls in the time of Constantine, but it seems obvious that such a down-to-earth fellow, such a realistic politician, would never have been tempted to join the ranks of a marginal sect or even a larger movement that was too obviously not of this world. If from a philosophical viewpoint Christianity offered Constantine internal consistency, it also offered him a practical vehicle for uniting the empire in common cause. The old gods, at war with one another, had already proven themselves unbelievable to the intelligentsia, and even for many simple souls pagan worship had devolved to little more than empty rote. Christianity was a religion that could outlast its adversaries—and that already boasted among its members many of the most reliable and upstanding people in the empire. If it did not claim a majority, it was inching ever closer to that goal. To Constantine it was obvious: Christianity was his ready-made instrument, the medium for revivifying the flagging spirits of an increasingly cynical populace and the bullhorn through which the imperial Thirteenth Apostle could speak to his subjects on God’s behalf.f

  But what was the internal consistency that had drawn so many devotees? Was it only the—admittedly extraordinary—lure of spiritual equality? Was it that Jewish monotheism, now repackaged in its open-door Christian format, answered the previously unanswerable challenges to polytheism that had been posed by Greek philosophy? It was these things, for sure, and no doubt many others as well. But, above all, what gave Christianity its remarkable inner cohesion was the figure of Jesus Christ himself. Nor is it necessary to be a believing Christian to appreciate the immense strength that this stupendous character lent to the new religion.

  (Photo Credit itr.2)

  Anything new must be received into the old. Buddhism, for instance, was received into an ancient Indian religious context, so much so that, in its vocabulary and outlook, it came to be understood as a kind of Reformed Hinduism. Similarly, the early attempts by Christian intellectuals to come to grips with the new revelation were largely limited by the mind-set of Greek philosophy. To one looking backwards from the twenty-first century, Clement of Alexandria seems as much a Greek philosopher (of negligible importance) as he does a Christian. His outlook might be more easily adopted by a Stoic of his own day than by a Christian of ours; and while only a few Christian leaders of our day would be able to muster much sympathy for the repressive, howling monks who murdered Hypatia, the sixth-century patriarch of Alexandria was comfortably at home among their fanatical obsessions, which amounted to a sort of dumbed-down, if baptized, version of Plotinus’s anti-carnal philosophy.

  For all that, the Christians of late antiquity understood that they were holding something new by the tail: they may not have been able to make out the full contours of the fabulous beast, but they had no doubt that it was alive and scarily larger than themselves. Almost from the moment the persecutions were past, Christians began to argue heatedly about Christ: who exactly was he? and how do we explain his role in the great scheme of things? Their undying disagreements over the nature and function of this figure were so fierce and unyielding that for us—at so great a distance from their concerns—they illuminate little about Jesus as we might come to understand him today, but they do serve to underscore the obvious fact that he was utterly central to ancient Christianity.

  The proposed solution to the quarrels, hammered out by bishops meeting in a series of councils (called “ecumenical” because they were thought to represent the whole Christian world), was that Jesus, though human—having “taken flesh” in the womb of his mother, Mary—was God’s Word incarnate. This Word of God had always existed, for he was the Second Person of the divine Trinity. The First was God the Father, and in this guise God had spoken to the prophets of Israel. The Second was God the Son, God’s own Word by the utterance of which he had brought the universe into being, as related in the Book of Genesis. The Third was God the Holy Spirit, who acted in time—who, for instance, had brought about the miraculous conception of Jesus and who animated the church, the Assembly of Christians, in its pilgrimage through history.

  The consequences of such rarefied, Greek-inspired thinking would shape the subsequent history of Christianity—and, therefore, of the Western world—like no other theological statements ever made. It is not surprising that Greek Christians, enamored of subtlety, would continue to gaze upon this construct and fashion it into the focus for all their theology and prayer. If Christ was both God and man, did he have two natures with two separate intellects and wills? If so, how did these natures communicate with each other? As God, he knew all things; as man, his knowledge was necessarily limited. In the gospels, Jesus does not seem always to know what will happen next, so did God keep things from himself? As man, Jesus was capable of committing sin. Since all human beings commit sins, what, if anything, stopped Jesus from becoming a sinner?

  Such speculations ensured unending controversies and ever-multiplying theological-political factions throughout the Greek world. Often enough, the controversies were so strident that considerable blood would be shed, sometimes spilled by slogan-reciting mobs of simpleminded monks. But in their secluded monasteries and chapels, monks and other clerics turned the esoteric into the palpable: the still point of Christian contemplation became the unapproachable Trinity, and invocations of the Trinity became essential to liturgical prayer. “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Deathless,” sang the chanters in their tripartite prayer as clouds of spiced incense billowed heavenward. “Let all mortal flesh keep silence / And with fear and trembling stand / Ponder nothing earthly minded.” Ponder the ineffable and bow before the mystery.

  For practical, can-do Romans, this was a bit much. Roman Christians found Greek distinctions tiresome, and the endless theological disputes occasioned by those distinctions made them cross-eyed with weariness. Yes, yes, Jesus is both God and man; now let’s move on. And the liturgies of the East, in their attempts to evoke the ineffable, certainly put one in mind of eternity, for they seemed just about endless. How many Kyrie eleisons is that damned deacon going to make us warble before he brings this litany to a conclusion?

  For Romans, liturgy was not a mystical end in itself. What the Greeks called the Sacred Liturgy, the Romans called missa (or mass) after the deacon’s last words, “Ite, missa est” (Go, you are dismissed). If that sounds to you as if their main interest was in getting out of church as soon as decently possible, you wouldn’t be so very far from the truth. Public prayer is not an end in itself, only part of a Christian life, a caesura of recollection; fortunately, it comes to an end and we are sent back to our lives. In fact, we come to t
his prayer not for some unspeakable spiritual high but to renew ourselves for further work in the world. We don’t even need always to chant the Eucharistic celebration or bother ourselves with arranging elaborate processions of vested acolytes or choke the air with incense. Sometimes, we can even celebrate a short, stationary, said mass, a low mass, with just one officiant and a handful of worshipers—which pared-back arrangement the Greeks thought an abomination. Such stylistic differences between East and West implied significant differences in theological perspective.

  Instead of getting off on the unutterable Trinity, Roman Christians found their attention drawn to the most down-to-earth aspect of Trinitarian doctrine: the Infleshing, the Incarnation, the Making of the God-Man. What, they asked themselves, are the practical consequences—to human beings—of the Word becoming flesh? From this question will flow, with some notable divagations, the main course of what was to become Western Christianity.

  Despite the aspirations of so many mystical Greeks, human beings are not disembodied spirits. What should matter to us is not so much the inner life of God—and whatever that may be, the truth is that not one of us knows squat about it—as the impact of divine revelation on our own lives. The only point at which we can sensibly connect with the Trinity is the point at which, as John’s Gospel puts it, “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” If God became man and took on our weakness, our pain, even our death, these things can no longer be the woeful embarrassments we have always conceived them to be, for they are now shot through with his grace and elevated by his willing participation in them. If God became man, lived an earthly life as all of us do—suckled, sweat, shat, wept, slept, loved, feared, bled, died—but also rose and returned to Heaven, the same route has been opened to all of us, to all “mortal flesh,” now impregnated with divinity. Our despised humanity entitles us, for it is now the humanity of God.