Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  In 318 Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, had put forward the idea that Jesus, the Word of God, had not been divine by nature. Quoting an impressive array of biblical texts, he contended that God had simply conferred divinity upon the man Jesus as a reward for his perfect obedience and humility. At this point there was no orthodox position about the nature of Christ, and many of the bishops felt quite at home with Arius’s theology. Like their pagan neighbors, they did not experience the divine as an impossibly distant reality; in the Greco-Roman world, it was taken for granted that men and women regularly became fully fledged gods.21 Eusebius, the leading Christian intellectual of his day, taught his congregations that God had revealed himself in human form before, first to Abraham, who had entertained three strangers at Mamre and discovered that Yahweh was participating in the conversation; later Moses and Joshua had similar theophanies.22 For Eusebius, God’s Word, or Logos—the divine element in a human being23—had simply returned to earth once more, this time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.24

  But Arius was vehemently opposed by Athanasius, his bishop’s young, combative assistant, who argued that God’s descent to earth was not a repetition of previous epiphanies but a unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable act of love. This resonated in some quarters, where there had been a major shift in the perception of the divine; many Christians no longer felt that they could ascend to God by their own efforts as, Arius claimed, Jesus had done. There seemed an impassable gulf between the God that was life itself and the material world, which now appeared chronically fragile and moribund. Dependent on God for their every breath, humans were powerless to save themselves. But paradoxically, Christians still found that when they contemplated the man Jesus, they saw a new divine potential in humanity, which moved them to look upon themselves and their neighbors differently. There was also a new appreciation of the human body. Christian spirituality had been strongly influenced by Platonism, which sought to liberate the soul from the body, but in some circles in the early fourth century, people were beginning to hope that their hitherto despised bodies could bring men and women to the divine—or at least that it was not a reality separate from the physical, as the Platonists held.25

  Athanasius’s doctrine of incarnation spoke directly to this changed mood. In the person of Jesus, he claimed, God had leaned across the dividing chasm and, in an astounding act of kenosis (“self-emptying”), had taken mortal flesh, shared our weakness, and utterly transformed fragile, perishable human nature. “The Logos became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius insisted. “He revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.”26 The good news of the gospel was the coming of new life, human because it was divine.27 Nobody was compelled to “believe” this doctrine; people embraced it because it reflected their personal experience. Athanasius’s doctrine of the “deification” (theosis) of humanity made perfect sense to those Christians who had become convinced that in some mysterious way they had already been transformed and that their humanity had acquired a new divine dimension. But theosis seemed nonsensical to those who had not experienced it.

  Two new “Christianities” had therefore emerged in response to a shift in the intellectual environment, both of which could claim support from past scriptures and luminaries. With quiet and sustained reflection, this dispute could easily have been settled peaceably. Instead it became entangled with imperial politics. Constantine, of course, had no understanding of these theological issues but was determined nevertheless to repair this breach of ecclesiastical consensus. In May 325 he summoned the bishops to a council in Nicaea to settle the matter once and for all. Here Athanasius managed to get the emperor’s ear and forced his position through. Most of the bishops, anxious not to incur Constantine’s displeasure, signed Athanasius’s creed but continued to preach as they had before. Nicaea solved nothing, and the Arian controversy dragged on for another sixty years. Constantine, out of his depth theologically, would eventually veer to the other side and take the Arian position that was promoted by the more cultured, aristocratic bishops.28 Athanasius, no aristocrat himself, was reviled by his enemies as an upstart “from the lowest depths of society” who was “no different from a common artisan.” For all his talk of kenosis, Athanasius never lost his pointy elbows or his theological certainty, which was inspired in no small part by the new monastic movement that had emerged in the deserts around Alexandria.

  In 270, the year of Constantine’s birth, a young Egyptian peasant had walked to church lost in thought. Antony had just inherited a sizable piece of land from his parents but found this good fortune an intolerable burden. He was only eighteen years old, yet now he had to provide for his sister, take a wife, have children, and toil on the farm for the rest of his life to support them all. In Egypt, where famine loomed whenever the Nile failed to flood, starvation was always a real threat, and most people accepted this relentless struggle as inevitable.29 But Jesus had said: “I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat and about your body and how to clothe it.”30 Antony also remembered that the first Christians had sold all their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor.31 Still musing on these texts, he entered the church only to hear the priest reading Jesus’s words to a rich young man: “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”32 Immediately Antony sold his property and embarked on a quest for freedom and holiness that would become a countercultural challenge to both the Christianized Roman state and the new worldly, imperial Christianity. Like other monastic communities we have considered, Antony’s followers would try to model a more egalitarian and compassionate way for people to live together.

  For the first fifteen years, like other “renouncers” (apotaktikoi), Antony lived at the very edge of his village; then he moved to the tombs on the periphery of the desert and finally ventured farther into the wilderness than any other monk, living for years in an abandoned fortress beside the Red Sea until, in 301 he began to attract disciples.33 In the immensity of the desert, Antony discovered a tranquillity (hesychia) that put worldly care into perspective.34 Saint Paul had insisted that Christians must support themselves,35 so Egyptian monks either worked as day laborers or sold their produce in the market. Antony grew vegetables so that he could offer hospitality to passing travelers, because learning to live kindly with others and sharing your wealth was essential to his monastic program.36

  For some time, Egyptian peasants had engaged in this type of disengagement (anchoresis) to escape economic or social tension. During the third century, there had been a crisis of human relations in the villages. These farmers were prosperous but acerbic and quick with their fists, yet the village’s tax burden and the need for cooperation to control the floodwaters of the Nile obliged them to live in unwelcome proximity with uncongenial neighbors.37 Success was often resented. “Although I possess a good deal of land and am occupied with its cultivation,” one farmer explained, “I am not involved with any person in the village but keep to myself.”38 When neighborly relationships became unendurable, therefore, people would sometimes retire to the very edge of the settlement.39 But once Christianity reached the Egyptian countryside in the late third century, anchoresis was no longer a disgruntled withdrawal but had become a positive choice to live according to the gospel in a way that offered a welcome and challenging alternative to the acrimony and tedium of settled life. The monk (monachos) lived alone (monos), seeking the “freedom from care” (amerimmia) that Jesus had prescribed.40

  Like the renouncers of previous times, the monks set up a counterculture, casting off their functional role in the agrarian economy and rejecting its inherent violence. A monk’s struggle began as soon as he left his village.41 At first, explained one of the greatest of these anchorites, he was plagued by terrifying thoughts “of lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor, fear of the starvation that will ensue, of the sickness that follows undernourishment, and the
deep shame of having to accept the necessities of life from the hands of others.”42 Their greatest task, however, was to still the violent impulses that lurk in the depths of the human psyche. The monks often described their struggles as a battle with demons, which we moderns usually understand as sexual temptations. But they were less preoccupied by sex than we are: Egyptian monks usually avoided women because they symbolized the economic burden they wanted to escape.43 Far more threatening than sex to these sharp-tongued Egyptian peasants was the “demon” of anger.44 However provocative the circumstances, monks must never respond aggressively to any attack. One abbot ruled that there was no excuse for violent speech, even if your brother “plucks out your right eye and cuts off your right hand.”45 A monk must not even look angry or make an impatient gesture.46 These monks meditated constantly on Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” because most of them did have enemies in the community.47 Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), one of the most influential monastic teachers, drew on Paul’s doctrine of kenosis and instructed monks to empty their minds of the rage, avarice, pride, and vainglory that tore the soul apart and made them close their hearts to others. By following these precepts, some learned to transcend their innate belligerence and achieved an interior peace that they experienced as a return to the Garden of Eden, when human beings had lived in harmony with one another and with God.

  The monastic movement spread more rapidly, demonstrating a widespread hunger for an alternative to a Christianity that was increasingly tainted by imperial associations. By the end of the fifth century, tens of thousands of monks were living beside the Nile and in the deserts of Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Armenia.48 They had, wrote Athanasius, created a spiritual city in the wilderness that was the antithesis of the worldly city, supported by taxation, oppression, and military aggression.49 Instead of creating an aristocracy that lived off the labor of others, monks were self-sufficient and existed at subsistence level, and whatever surplus they produced, they gave to the poor. Instead of the Pax Romana enforced by martial violence, they cultivated hesychia and systematically rid their minds of anger, violence, and hatred. Like Constantine, Antony was venerated by many as epigeios theos, a “god on earth,” but he ruled with kindness rather than coercion.50 The monks were the new “friends of God” whose power had been achieved by a self-effacing lifestyle that had no earthly profit.51

  After the Council of Nicaea, some Christians began to fall out of love with their emperors. They had expected Christian Rome to become a utopia that would somehow eliminate the cruelty and violence of the imperial state, but they found instead that Roman belligerence had infiltrated the Church. Constantine, his son Constantius II (r. 337–61), and their successors continued the struggle for consensus, using force when necessary, and their victims called them “persecutors.” First, it was Athanasius’s “Nicenes” who suffered, but after the Council of Constantinople (381), which made Athanasius’s creed the official faith of the empire, it was the Arians’ turn. There were no formal executions, but people were massacred when soldiers invaded a church to break up a heretical gathering, and increasingly both sides complained far more about their opponents’ violence than about their theology. In the early years, while Athanasius still enjoyed Constantine’s favor, Arians complained of his “greed, aggression, and boundless ambition”52 and accused him of “force,” “murder,” and the “killing of bishops.”53 For their part, the Nicenes vividly described the rattling weapons and flashing swords of the imperial troops, who thrashed their deacons and trampled worshippers underfoot.54 Both sides dwelled obsessively on their enemies’ vicious treatment of the consecrated virgins,55 and both revered their dead as “martyrs.” Christians were developing a history of grievance that intensified during the brief but dramatic reign of the emperor Julian (361–63), known as “the Apostate.”

  Despite his Christian upbringing, Julian had come to detest the new faith, convinced it would ruin the empire. Many of his subjects felt the same. Those who still loved the old rites feared that this violation of the Pax Deorum would result in political catastrophe. Throughout the imperial domains, Julian appointed pagan priests to sacrifice to the One God worshipped under many names—as Zeus, Jupiter, Helios, or in the Hebrew Bible, “God Most High.”56 He removed Christians from public office, gave special privileges to towns that had never adopted Christianity, and announced that he would rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Julian was careful to avoid outright persecution but merely boosted pagan sacrifice, refurbished pagan shrines, and covertly encouraged anti-Christian violence.57 Over the years a great deal of pent-up resentment had accumulated against the Church, and when Julian’s edicts were published, in some towns pagans rioted against Christians, who now discovered how vulnerable they really were.

  Once again, some Christians responded to the state that had suddenly turned against them with the defiant gesture of martyrdom. Most of the martyrs who died during these two years were either killed by pagan mobs or put to death by local officials for their provocative attacks on pagan religion.58 As Jews began work on their new temple and pagans gleefully refurbished their shrines, conflict throughout the empire centered on iconic buildings. Ever since Constantine, Christians had become accustomed to seeing the decline of Judaism as the essential concomitant to the triumph of the Church. Now as they watched the purposeful activity of the Jewish workmen on the temple site in Jerusalem, they felt as if the fabric of their own faith had been undermined. At Merum in Phrygia, there was a more ominous development. While the local pagan temple was being repaired and the statues of the gods polished, three Christians, “unable to endure the indignity put upon their religion and impelled by a fervent zeal for virtue, rushed by night into the temple and broke the images in pieces.” This amounted to a suicide attack on a building that seemed to epitomize their new humiliation. Even though the governor urged them to repent, they refused, “declaring their readiness to undergo any sufferings, rather than pollute themselves by sacrificing.” Consequently, they were tortured and roasted to death on a gridiron.59 A new spate of martyr stories appeared, even more sensational than the original Acta.

  In this aggressive form of martyrdom, the martyrs were no longer the innocent victims of imperial violence: their battles now took the form of a symbolic—and sometimes suicidal—assault upon the enemies of the faith. Like some modern religious extremists, Christians felt that they had suffered a sudden loss of power and prestige—all the more acute in their case because the memory of their days as a despised minority were so recent.60 Christians courted martyrdom by smashing the pagan gods’ effigies, disrupting rituals and defacing the temples that symbolized their degradation, and loudly praising those who had defied Julian’s “tyranny.” When Julian was killed in a military expedition against Persia and Jovian, a Christian, was proclaimed emperor in his place, it seemed like a divine deliverance. But Julian’s reign, which had so rudely shattered the Christians’ newfound security and entitlement, had created a polarized religious climate and, at least among the lower classes, had exacerbated hostility between Christians and pagans. “Never again!” would be the Christian watchword as they contemplated renewed attacks on the pagan establishment in the coming years.61 State repression creates a history of grievance that often radicalizes a religious tradition and can even push an originally irenic vision into a campaign of violence.

  Christian and pagan aristocrats, however, still shared a common culture that did much to mitigate this aggression among the upper classes. Throughout the empire, young noblemen and talented individuals of humble birth were inducted in a “formation” (paedeia) dating from ancient times.62 It was not a purely academic program, though it was intellectually rigorous, but was primarily an initiation that shaped the behavior of the ruling class and profoundly molded their attitudes. As a result, wherever they traveled in the empire, they found that they could relate to their peers. Paedeia was an important antidote to the violence of late Roman society, where slaves were regularly beaten to
death, where the flogging of social inferiors was perfectly acceptable, and where councilors were publicly thrashed for tax arrears. A truly cultivated Roman was unfailingly courteous and self-controlled, since anger, vituperative speech, and irascible gestures were unbecoming to a gentleman, who was expected to yield graciously to others and behave at all times with restraint, calm, and gravitas.

  Because of paedeia, the old religion remained an integral part of late Roman culture, and its ethos was also absorbed into the life of the Church, where young men brought these attitudes with them to the baptismal font; some even saw paedeia as an indispensable preparation for Christianity.63 “With measured words, I learn to bridle rage,” the Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) told his congregation.64 His friends Basil, bishop of Caesarea (c. 330–79), and Gregory, bishop of Nyssa (331–95), Basil’s younger brother, were not baptized until after they had completed this traditional training.65 The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers, developed toward the end of the Arian crisis. They had been uneasy about these disputes, strident on both sides, each of which had cultivated a hardened certainty about these ineffable matters. The Cappadocians practiced the silent, reticent prayer designed by Evagrius of Pontus, in part to strip the mind of such angry dogmatism. They knew that it was impossible to speak about God as we speak about ordinary matters, and the Trinity was designed first to help Christians realize that what we call God lay beyond the reach of words and concepts. They would also introduce Christians to a meditation on the Trinity that would help them to develop attitudes of restraint in their own lives, enabling them to counter aggressive and bellicose intolerance.