7. Enchiridion, in Augustine, Works, vol. 9, edited by M. Dods (Edinburgh: Clark, 1871–77), 180–181.
8. Ironically, the spirit of Christian dogmatic intolerance was foreshadowed by Plato himself in such dialogues as the Republic and the Laws. Similarly mindful of the need to protect the young from temptation and misleading thoughts, and similarly certain of possessing knowledge of absolute truth and goodness, Plato outlined a wide range of prohibitions and strictures for his ideal state that were not unlike those later established by Christianity.
9. A few revelant dates and events for the transition from the classical to the medieval era: In the late summer of 386, Augustine experienced his conversion to Christianity in Milan. In 391, the Sarapeum, the Alexandrian temple to the Hellenistic supreme deity Sarapis, was destroyed by the patriarch Theophilus and his followers, marking the triumph of Christianity over paganism in Egypt and throughout the empire. In 415, in the same decade in which the Visigoths overran Rome and Augustine was writing The City of God, a Christian mob in Alexandria murdered Hypatia—leader of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy in Alexandria, daughter of the last known member of the Museum, and the personal symbol of pagan learning. With her death, many scholars left Alexandria, marking the beginning of that city’s cultural decline. In 485, Proclus, the greatest systematic expositor of late classical Neoplatonism and the last major Greek philosopher of antiquity, died in Athens. In 529, the Christian emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, the last physical establishment of pagan learning. That year has often been used as a convenient date for the end of the classical period and the beginning of the Middle Ages, for also in 529 Benedict of Nursia, the father of Christian monasticism in the West, founded the first Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy (the same monastery where Thomas Aquinas would be brought as a child almost precisely seven hundred years later).
10. An influential statement of this position was that of the Alexandrian Christian Neoplatonist Origen (c 185–c. 254), for whom hell could not be absolute because God in his infinite goodness could never finally abandon any of his creatures. The experience of damnation was based on an individual’s self-imposed condemnation, a deliberate turning away from God that effectively cut off the individual soul from God’s love; hell thus consisted in the complete absence of God. But for Origen this experience of alienation was ultimately a temporary condition in a larger educational process through which every soul would be reunited with God, whose love was all-conquering. In respect of humanity’s inherent freedom, God’s redemptive process might necessarily be prolonged, but until universal redemption had occurred Christ’s mission remained unfulfilled. Similarly, Origen viewed the negative events of human existence not as divine retribution but as instruments of spiritual formation. Popular piety might perceive them as punitive acts of a vengeful God, but such views were based on a distorted understanding of God’s activity, which was ultimately informed by unlimited benevolence. As with hell, heaven also was not necessarily absolute, for in their continuing free will the redeemed souls could, at the conclusion of the redemptive process, initiate once again the entire drama. Origen’s theology rested throughout on the simultaneous affirmation of God’s goodness and the soul’s freedom, with the soul’s ascent to divinity marked by a hierarchy of stages culminating in mystical union with the Logos: the restoration of the soul from matter to spirit, from image to reality.
Although Origen has been regarded by many as the greatest teacher of the early Church after the apostles, his orthodoxy has been sharply questioned by others on various matters, including his doctrines on universal salvation, the preexistence of the individual soul, the Neoplatonic devaluation of the Son as a hypostatic step down from the One, his spiritualizing of the resurrection of the body, his allegorical transformation of salvational history into a timeless archetypal process, and his speculations on world cycles. See Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement and Origen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
11. Scholars have often noted the many striking thematic parallels between the biblical Book of Job (c 600–300 B.C.) and Aeschylus’s approximately contemporaneous tragedy Prometheus Bound. Comparable historical and literary parallels have been recognized between the earlier Mosaic books of the Bible and the Homeric epics.
12. In his desire to establish a world church and thus to make the Christian gospel intelligible to those from different cultural backgrounds, Paul modulated his teachings accordingly, speaking “as a Jew to the Jews,” “as a Greek to the Greeks.” To the church community in Rome, with its strong Jewish influence, he emphasized the doctrine of justification, but in letters to communities with a more Hellenistic background, he described salvation in terms reminiscent of the Greek mystery religions—the new man, sonship with God, the process of divine transformation, and so forth.
13. The papacy of Gregory the Great (590–604) established many of the most characteristic features of medieval Western Christendom. Born in Rome and deeply influenced by the teachings of Augustine, Gregory centralized and reformed the papal administration, elevated the status of priests, expanded the Church’s care for the poor and distressed, and pressed for the pope’s recognition as ecumenical leader of Christendom over the claims of the Byzantine patriarch. He also helped establish the papacy’s temporal authority by consolidating what would become the Papal States in Italy and, more generally, by his efforts to influence and compel secular authorities through the exercise of ecclesiastical authority. His ideal was to build a universal Christian society pervaded by charity and service to others. It was Gregory who especially recognized the importance of the migrating barbarians for the future of Christianity in the West, and he vigorously pursued missionary activities in Europe (including the historically significant mission to England). Although at times he recommended a sensitive respect for indigenous views and practices, as in England, on other occasions he advocated the use of force in his conversion efforts. A highly popular pope and widely venerated in his own lifetime, Gregory sought to make the Christian faith more comprehensible to the masses of uneducated Europeans by reforming the Mass and by popularizing miracles and the doctrine of purgatory. He encouraged the growth of monasticism, and established rules for the lives of the clergy. Gregorian chant, the liturgical music of the Catholic Church, was named after him, having been codified during his reign.
14. The separation between the Eastern and Western churches began in the fifth century, and a formal schism was declared in 1054. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church insisted on Roman and papal primacy (on the basis of its interpretation of Christ’s words to Peter in the Gospel according to Matthew, 16:18), Eastern Orthodox Christianity remained more of an ecumenical association of churches bound together by the communion of faith, with the laity playing a greater role in religious affairs. On the other hand, instead of the state-church dialectic of the West (created in large part by the barbarian invasions and the consequent political and cultural break with the old Western Roman Empire), the Eastern church remained closely associated with the continuing political system of the Byzantine Empire. The patriarch of Constantinople was often subordinate to the Eastern emperor, who regularly exercised his authority in ecclesiastical matters.
In general, the sense of the need for authoritatively defined and meticulously detailed doctrinal orthodoxy was less pronounced in the East than in the West, and the ecumenical council, rather than the pope, was the highest authority in doctrinal matters. Christian truth was viewed as a living reality experienced within the Church, rather than, as in the West, a fully articulated dogmatic system that attempts to contain that truth according to specific criteria of justification. Whereas the dominant influence in the Latin West was Augustinian, Eastern theology was rooted in the Greek fathers. Its doctrinal tendency was more mystical, placing emphasis not on human beings’ individual justification by the Church (as in the West), but on their communal divinization within the Churc
h, as well as on their individual divinization through contemplative asceticism. The juridical relation between God and man characteristic of Western Christianity was absent in the East, where the sovereign themes were the incarnation of God, the deification of humanity. and the divine transfiguration of the cosmos. Generally speaking, Eastern Christianity remained closer to the Johannine unitive mystical impulse in the Christian faith, while the West pursued a more dualistic Augustinian direction.
15. The reconceiving of the Kingdom of Heaven in terms of the Church reflected a fundamental self-transformation of Christian belief which began in the first generations of the Christian religion in response to the delay in Christ’s Second Coming. Early Christians had expected an imminent Second Coming, with the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven to be preceded by a time of rebelliousness and evil, when false prophets and messiahs would arise and lead many astray with signs and wonders; then would occur a global apocalypse, followed by a dramatic opening of the heavens revealing God in his full glory, with Christ descending from the heavens to embrace and liberate the faithful. Already in the New Testament, and particularly in the Gospel according to John, there appeared to be a progressive awareness of the Second Coming’s delay—though it was still considered near—and an apparent compensation for that delay expressed through an increasingly exalted interpretation of Jesus’s life and death, the coming of the Spirit, and the significance of the young Church community. Jesus’s presence in history was seen as having already inaugurated the salvational transformation. In Christ’s resurrection was mankind’s resurrection, its new life. Through the presence of his Spirit, Christ had risen into the life of the new community of the faithful, his mystical body, the living and growing Church. Thus the delay of the Parousia had been answered for the present: its arrival had been relocated to a more distant future, and Christ’s spiritual power had been already claimed and experienced in the continuing life of the Church faithful.
Yet, contrary to expectation, the world continued to endure, and thus the Church, initially conceived as having a brief transitional existence prior to the end time, was encouraged to take on a more substantial role, with a corresponding change in its self-interpretation: rather than the small body of the elect who would be present and saved in the coming apocalypse, the Church now recognized itself as an ongoing, expanding sacramental institution—baptizing, teaching, disciplining, saving. From such a foundation the Church grew, increasingly moving from its earlier, flexible form of communities of the faithful to a complex institution with highly defined structures of hierarchical power and doctrinal tradition, and with an essential distinction drawn between the ecclesiastical elite and the lay congregation over which it presided.
The final outcome of this process emerged in the last centuries of the classical era. With Constantine’s conversion, and with the subsequent welding of the Roman state to the Christian religion, a new mood began to appear in the Church: The eschatological expectations of the early Christian community were now submerged by the new sense of a strong earthly Church, whose present triumph overshadowed the demand for and likelihood of an apocalyptic shift. Without persecutions, the Christian community’s psychological need for an immediate apocalypse was less intense, and with Christianity now the favored imperial religion, Rome’s previous role as the preapocalyptic Antichrist was no longer appropriate.
Concurrently, under the influence of Neoplatonic and Hellenic allegorical thought, Origen and Augustine reformulated the Kingdom of Heaven in terms that were less literal and objective, and instead more spiritual and subjective. For Origen, the genuine religious quest was to experience the Kingdom of Heaven in one’s own soul—a metaphysical rather than a historical transformation. Augustine’s view was similarly Neoplatonic, but with a more decisively polarized attitude concerning the relationship between this world and the Church. Living during the death throes of classical civilization, Augustine viewed the present world as a realm inherently susceptible to evil, just as did those who had earlier awaited the apocalypse; and he too saw humanity juridically divided between the elect and the damned. Yet the salvational solution he recognized was not that of an apocalyptic renovation of this world, but a sacramental renovation of the soul through the Church. The secular world was not destined for salvation; that condition was a spiritual one only and was already available through the Church.
Thus the Christian anticipation of an imminent end time was substantially weakened and began to disappear as a dominant motivating force in the religion. The institutional Church was thereby solidified and reconceived as the enduring historical representative of the Kingdom of God on earth. Between the Resurrection and the Second Coming was the reign of the Church, and its sacraments were already the means by which Christians began their own “resurrection” and entrance into the heavenly kingdom. Concern with the individual Christian’s relation to God and interior spiritual condition replaced the earlier stress on the collective, the universal, and the objectively historical. The collective and historical import of early Christian eschatology was now subsumed by the Church, which enacted its historical imperative by its public responsibility in preserving and propagating the faith, and by providing the community of believers with the grace-giving sacraments. For the established forms of Christianity from Augustine’s time on, eschatology was understood symbolically, with its literal historical expectation seen as a primitive mythological misunderstanding of the biblical revelation, without genuine relevance to humanity’s present spiritual condition.
The original eschatological impulse, however, never entirely disappeared. On the one hand, it lived on as an undercurrent in which history was still implicitly seen as moving ideologically toward a spiritual climax, but with Christ’s return at the end time, though inevitable, postponed to the indefinite future. On the other hand, fresh expectations of an imminent apocalypse and Second Coming periodically emerged in specific individuals and communities, accompanied by a marked intensification of religious fervor, and based on new interpretations of the biblical prophecies or on new recognitions of the evil and chaotic character of the contemporary age. But such expectations were usually fostered on the fringes of the established Church, especially by heretical sects suffering persecutions. The Church discouraged literal interpretations of eschatology and recommended that faith be placed in its sacraments, by which such anxieties could be overcome. To calculate the end time was futile, it taught, since for God a thousand years might equal a day, or vice versa.
Finally, with the rise of modern humanism and the modern mind’s increased awareness of history and evolution, Christian conceptions of the millennial transformation took on a more progressive and immanent quality, with humanity’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development culminating in some form of human or cosmic divinization—a conceptual shift visible from the time of Erasmus and Francis Bacon, and achieving more elaborate formulation in later thinkers such as Hegel and Teilhard de Chardin (and, in a different spirit, in Nietzsche). In connection with some ambiguous symbolism contained in several biblical prophecies, especially in the Book of Revelation, and in response to various historical developments (e.g., the European discovery and settling of America, the papal declaration of the dogma of the Assumption, the nuclear and ecological threats of planetary catastrophe), it has frequently been suggested that the Second Coming would occur at the end of the two-thousand-year Christian aeon, in the late twentieth century. (See, for example, Carl G. Jung’s extraordinary discussion in “Answer to Job,” in Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, vol. 11, translated by R. F. C. Hull, edited by H. Read et al. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969].)
16. As the Mother of the Logos, Mary took on attributes of the Judaic biblical figure of Sophia, or Wisdom—described in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus as God’s eternal creation, a celestial feminine being who personified divine wisdom and mediated humanity’s knowledge of God. In Roman Catholic theology, Mary was explicitly identified with Sophia. The relationship of the
Old Testament Sophia to the New Testament Logos, both of which represented the divine creative and revelatory wisdom, was thus obliquely reflected in the relationship of Mary to Christ. The figure of the Virgin Mother also absorbed some of the original meaning and function of the Holy Spirit—as principle of divine presence in the Church, as comforter, as mediator of wisdom and spiritual birth, and as instrument of Christ’s entrance into the world.
More generally, Catholicism’s partial transformation of God into a sheltering and forgiving maternal-like figure prompted Erich Fromm to comment that “Catholicism signified the disguised return to the religion of the Great Mother who had been defeated by Yahweh” (The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963], 90–91). In the mystical literature of Christian spirituality (e.g., Clement of Alexandria, John of the Cross), explicitly maternal qualities, such as nourishing breasts, were ascribed to God and Christ. For a discussion of both the presence and the suppression of the feminine in Christian theology and worship, see Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, The Feminine Dimension of the Divine (Wilmette, 111.: Chiron, 1987).
17. Despite the exaltation of the feminine suggested by the Mother Church and Virgin Mary themes, a patriarchal authoritarianism, often theologically justified by reference to the Genesis account of Eve’s role in the Fall, continued to express itself through the Church’s systematic depreciation of women, of women’s spirituality and capacity for religious authority, and (in accord with the sin of Eve and the idealization of the Virgin Mary) of human sexuality.
In both the organization and the self-image of the Church, two polar aspects were expressed which were gender-related. Considered as the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Church took on the role of Yahweh in the Old Testament, the masculine divine authority of God, with corresponding traits of juridical sovereignty, dogmatic certainty, and paternal guardianship and care. By contrast, considered as the body of the faithful, the Church took on the role of Israel in the Old Testament, the feminine beloved of God (later incarnate in the Virgin Mary), with the corresponding Christian inculcation of such “feminine” virtues as compassion, purity, humility, and obedience. The pope, bishops, and priests represented the divine authority on earth, while the laity represented that which needed to be instructed, justified, and saved. This same polarity was expressed as that of the “head” of the Church and the “body” of the Church. Theologically, the polarity was overcome in the doctrinal understanding of Christ as fulfillment and synthesis of both sides of the Church (just as Christ was seen as fruit of the marriage between Yahweh and Israel).
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