The decision by Constantine to move the capital of the Roman Empire eastward from Rome to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) also had immense consequences for the West, for after the empire’s division into an eastern and western sector, and after the western empire’s collapse in the wake of the barbarian migrations, a political and cultural vacuum occurred in much of Europe. The Church became the only institution capable of sustaining some semblance of social order and civilized culture in the West, and the bishop of Rome, as the traditional spiritual head of the imperial metropolis, gradually absorbed many of the distinctions and roles previously possessed by the Roman emperor. The Church took over a variety of governmental functions and became the sole patron of knowledge and the arts, its clergy became the West’s sole literate class, and the pope became the supreme sacred authority, who could anoint or excommunicate emperors and kings. The new states of Europe that were founded on the ruins of the Western empire, which were successively converted to Christianity, inevitably perceived papal Rome as the sovereign spiritual center of Christendom. In the course of the first millennium, the Western Church not only concentrated its power in the Roman bishop, it also gradually but decisively asserted its independence from the Eastern churches centered in Byzantium and allied there with the still-reigning Eastern emperor. The geographical distances, the differences in language, culture, and political circumstances, the differing effects of the barbarian and Moslem incursions, various major doctrinal conflicts, and finally the West’s own autonomous tendencies—all widened the separation between the Latin church of Rome and the Greek church of Byzantium.14
In these circumstances, Christianity in the West experienced a unique historical opportunity. Freed from both the church and the state of the East, unimpeded by the previous civil and secular structures of the old empire in the West, and empowered by the religiosity of its peoples and their rulers, the Western church assumed an extraordinarily universal authority in medieval Europe. The Roman Church became not just the Empire’s religious counterpart, but its historical successor. The ideal self-image of the ensuing medieval Church was that of a spiritual Pax Romana reigning over the world under the guidance of a wise and beneficent priestly hierarchy. Augustine himself had envisioned the fall of the old Rome, the temporal empire, in the light of a new Rome, the spiritual empire of the Christian Church, which began with the apostles and would continue throughout history as a reflection in this world of God’s divine Kingdom. In doing so, Augustine mediated that momentous transition taken by Christianity as it reconceived the nature of the promised Kingdom of Heaven in terms of the existing Church.15 As the Middle Ages progressed and the Church gradually consolidated its authority in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church definitively emerged as the one, true, universally authoritative institution ordained by God to bring salvation to mankind.
The Virgin Mary and the Mother Church
The large-scale conversion of the pagan masses in the late Roman Empire brought about one other remarkable development in the Christian religion. Although the New Testament gave relatively little information about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and little explicit support for any substantial role she might have in the Church’s future, in the course of the later classical period and the Middle Ages an extraordinary cult of Mary as the numinous Mother of God spontaneously arose and asserted itself as a dominant element in the popular Christian vision. Both Old and New Testaments were almost uniformly patriarchal in their monotheism, but when the pagan multitudes converted to Christianity in the post-Constantinian empire, they brought with them a deeply ingrained tradition of the Great Mother Goddess (as well as several mythological examples of divine virgins and virgin births of divine heroes), the infusion of which into Christian piety significantly expanded the Church’s veneration of Mary. Yet Mary fundamentally differed from the pagan goddesses in being the unique human mother of the Son of God, the pivotal historical figure in the unrepeatable act of Christ’s incarnation, rather than a nature goddess governing timeless cycles of death and rebirth. From the pagan mythological ground sprung an intensified devotion to Mary, whose role and character, however, were developed within a specifically Christian understanding.
Given the scriptural background alone, the elevation of Mary to such an exalted role in Christian piety was an unexpected development. References to Mary in the Gospels are not extensive, nor are they entirely congruent. When in Luke’s Gospel she receives the angelic announcement that she is to conceive the Son of God, she is portrayed as graciously obedient to God’s will, conscious of the special role she is to play in the divine plan, uniquely fitted for that role because of her profound purity in body and soul. Yet passages in the Gospel according to Mark, probably based on an older tradition, portray a more typically human character, suggesting that she may have been unaware of Jesus’s divine role during much of his lifetime. In Mark as well are references to Jesus’s having several close relatives, possibly brothers and sisters, who, like his mother, seem to have opposed Jesus in the earlier stages of his self-perceived mission. Even the Gospel according to John contains signs of definite tension between Mary and her son. The scriptural evidence for Mary’s being a virgin when she conceived and gave birth is also ambiguous. Two Gospels, Mark and John, do not mention the subject at all, nor do Paul’s letters. The two Gospels that do, Matthew and Luke, are implicitly inconsistent, since both accounts also present genealogical tables demonstrating Jesus to be from the direct line of David (and, in Luke’s case, of Adam), ending in Mary’s husband, Joseph, not in Mary.
But with her recognition by the faithful as the virginal Mother of God, and with the theologians’ portrayal of her as vessel for the incarnation of the divine Logos, Mary was soon venerated in the early Church as the mediator between humanity and Christ and even as “Coredemptrix” with Christ. Within Mary had taken place the first merging of the divine and the human. As Christ was seen as the second Adam, so Mary was the second Eve, through her obedient virginal conception bringing redemption to humanity and nature, rectifying the virginal Eve’s primal disobedience. Mary stood as supreme exemplar for all those virtues so characteristic of the Christian ethos—purity and chasteness, tenderness and modesty, simplicity, meekness, immaculate blessedness, inner beauty, moral innocence, unselfish devotion, surrender to the divine will.
The infusion via Mary of the feminine nurturing element from the pagan Great Mother Goddess, as well as the latter’s fundamental relation to nature, served to soften the more austerely transcendent and masculine Judaic God. Mary’s elevation to the virtual status of divine Mother also provided a necessary (for the converted pagans) complement to the otherwise inexplicably solitary and absolute God the Father. The recognition and worship of the Virgin Mother made the Christian pantheon more congenial to the classical world’s sensibility and served as an effective link between Christianity and the pagan nature religions of rebirth. But where earlier matriarchal goddesses presided over nature, the Virgin Mary’s role was in the context of human history. It was of the greatest importance to early theologians that the human Mary’s maternal relation to Christ guaranteed the latter’s authentic humanity, against some Gnostic claims that Christ was exclusively a superhuman divine being.
At times, the massive popular veneration of Mary seemed from the Church’s viewpoint to exceed the bounds of theological justifiability. That problem was resolved, however, both by the Church and in the popular imagination, through the identification of the Virgin Mary with the Church. As Mary was the first believer in Christ upon her acceptance of the divine annunciation of his birth, and the first human to receive Christ within her, she represented the prototype of the entire Church community. In relation to Mary’s receptive and virginal aspect, the Church was viewed as the “bride of Christ,” to be united in sacred marriage with Christ when humanity would receive the full divine influx at the end of time. But even more significant was the identification of Mary’s maternal qualities with the Church: The “Holy Mother Church,” under
the immanent guardianship of Mary, became not only the embodiment of Christian humanity but also the nourishing matrix within which all Christians could be encompassed, protected, and guided.16
Christians thus conceived of themselves as children of the Mother Church as well as children of God the Father. The nurturing maternal image of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Church thereby complemented and ameliorated not only the stern patriarchal image of the biblical Yahweh but also the Church’s own tendencies toward strict legalism and patriarchal authoritarianism.17 Even the architecture of church buildings, with their luminous interiors and sacral uterine structures, culminating in the great medieval cathedrals, re-created this tangible sense of the virginal Mother’s numinous womb. And the Catholic Church as a whole took on the universal cultural role of an all-encompassing spiritual, intellectual, moral, and social womb, gestating the nascent Christian community, the mystical body of Christ, prior to its rebirth in the heavenly Kingdom. It would seem to have been particularly in this form—the veneration of Mary and the transference of her maternal numinosity onto the Church—that the unitive element of Christianity was most successfully sustained in the collective Christian psyche.
A Summing Up
Thus the primitive Christian revelation took on various cultural and intellectual inflections—Judaic, Greek and Hellenistic, Gnostic and Neoplatonist, Roman and Near Eastern—which Christianity brought into an often contradictory but singularly durable synthesis. Pluralistic in its origins but monolithic in its developed form, that synthesis would effectively govern the European mind until the Renaissance.
Let us attempt to draw a few summary distinctions between this outlook and that of the Greco-Roman era, focusing particularly here on the character of the Christian vision in the West from the later classical period through the early Middle Ages. Within this frame of reference, and allowing for the inevitable imprecision of such generalities, one may say that the overall effect of Christianity on the Greco-Roman mind was as follows:
(1) to establish a monotheistic hierarchy in the cosmos through the recognition of one supreme God, the triune Creator and Lord of history, thereby absorbing and negating the polytheism of pagan religion while depreciating, though not eliminating, the metaphysics of archetypal Forms;
(2) to reinforce Platonism’s spirit-matter dualism by infusing it with the doctrine of Original Sin, the Fall of man and nature, and collective human guilt; by largely severing from nature any immanent divinity, whether polytheistic or pantheistic, though leaving the world an aura of supernatural significance, either theistic or satanic; and by radically polarizing good and evil;
(3) to dramatize the relation of the transcendent to the human in terms of God’s rulership of history, the narrative of the Chosen People, the historical appearance of Christ on earth, and his eventual reappearance to save mankind in a future apocalyptic age—thus introducing a new sense of historical dynamism, a divine redemptive logic in history that was linear rather than cyclical; yet gradually relocating this redemptive force in the ongoing institutional Church, thereby implicitly restoring a more static understanding of history;18
(4) to absorb and transform the pagan Mother Goddess mythology into a historicized Christian theology with the Virgin Mary as the human Mother of God, and into a continuing historical and social reality in the form of the Mother Church;
(5) to diminish the value of observing, analyzing, or understanding the natural world, and thus to deemphasize or negate the rational and empirical faculties in favor of the emotional, moral, and spiritual, with all human faculties encompassed by the demands of Christian faith and subordinated to the will of God; and
(6) to renounce the human capacity for independent intellectual or spiritual penetration of the world’s meaning in deference to the absolute authority of the Church and Holy Scripture for the final definition of truth.
It has been said that a Manichaean cloud overshadowed the medieval imagination. Both popular Christian piety and much medieval theology evidenced a decisive depreciation of the physical world and the present life, with “the world, the flesh, and the devil” frequently grouped together as a satanic triumvirate. Mortification of the flesh was a characteristic spiritual imperative. The natural world was the vale of sorrow and death, a stronghold of evil from which the believer would be mercifully released at the end of this life. One entered the world reluctantly, as would a knight who entered a realm of shadow and sin hoping only to resist, overcome, and pass beyond it. For many early medieval theologians, direct study of the natural world and the development of an autonomous human reason were seen as pernicious threats to the integrity of religious faith. It is true that according to official Christian doctrine the goodness of God’s material creation was not ultimately denied, but in itself the world was not considered a worthy focus of human endeavor. If it was not altogether evil, it was, in spiritual terms, largely irrelevant.
The fate of the human soul was divinely preordained, known by God before time began, a belief paralleled and psychologically supported by the apparent powerlessness of early medieval men and women in the face of nature, history, and traditional authority. The drama of human life may have been the central focus of God’s will, but the human role was a weak and inferior one. Compared with, say, Homer’s Odysseus, the medieval individual could be seen as relatively impotent in the face of evil and the world, a lost soul without the constant guidance and protection of the Church. (“Wandering” in this view was less likely to be a heroic adventure than a heretical slipping into ungodly ways.) Compared with, for example, Socrates, the medieval Christian could be seen as laboring under considerable intellectual confinement. (“Doubt” in this view was less a primary intellectual virtue than a serious spiritual failing.) The assertion of human individuality—so conspicuous, say, in Periclean Athens—now seemed largely negated in favor of a pious acceptance of God’s will and, in more practical terms, submission to the Church’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual authority. It thus might appear to be the great paradox of Christianity’s history that a message whose original substance—the proclamation of the divine rebirth of the cosmos, the turning point of the aeons through the human incarnation of the Logos—had unprecedentedly elevated the significance of human life, human history, and human freedom eventually served to enforce a somewhat antithetical conception.
Yet the Christian world view, even in its medieval form, was not as simple or one-sided as these distinctions might suggest. Both impulses—optimistic and pessimistic, dualistic and unitive—constantly intermingled in inextricable synthesis. Indeed, it was held by the Church that one side of the polarity necessitated the other—that, for example, the great celestial destiny of the Christian faithful and the supreme beauty of the Christian truth demanded such formidable measures of institutional control and doctrinal rigor. In the eyes of many conscientious Christians, the fact that the continuity of sacred revelation and ritual had been successfully maintained century after century far outweighed the passing evils of contemporary Church politics or the temporary distortions of popular belief and theological doctrine. From such a perspective, the Church’s saving grace lay finally in the cosmic significance of its earthly mission. The manifest faults of the mundane Church were merely inevitable side effects of the imperfect human attempt to carry out a divine plan the scope of which was inconceivably great. On similar grounds, Christian dogma and ritual were perceived as standing above and beyond the independent judgment of individual Christians—as if all Christians were to absorb themselves in symbolic representations of cosmic truths, the sublimity and magnitude of which were not now directly accessible to the believer, but which eventually might be grown into and comprehended in the course of humanity’s spiritual progress. And whatever medieval Christians’ apparent existential diminution, they knew themselves to be the potential recipients of Christ’s redeeming grace through the Church, which elevated them beyond all other peoples in history and vitiated any negative comparisons with the paga
n cultures.
But such religious defenses aside, in comparing one era with another, we have been implicitly contrasting the average person in early medieval Western Christendom with a relatively small group of brilliant Greeks who flourished during a relatively brief period of unique cultural creativity at the start of the classical era. The medieval West was not without its geniuses, even if in the earlier centuries they were few and only occasionally influential. To claim that this dearth was due more to Christianity than to other historical factors would be rash, especially considering not only the decline of classical culture well before the ascendance of Christianity, but also the extraordinary achievements of later Christian culture. And we should not forget that Socrates was put to death by the Athenian democracy for “impiety”; nor was he the only philosopher or scientist of antiquity to be indicted for unorthodox opinions. Conversely, the medieval Arthurian knights of the Holy Grail were not unworthy successors to their Homeric forebears. Adventurousness and dogmatism certainly exist in every age, even if the balance between them shifts, and in the long run one no doubt spurs the other. In any case, a more general psychological comparison between the medieval and classical ages would be more just and perhaps show less disparity.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 22