Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  A series of brilliant papal entrepreneurs headed the Roman church between 370 and 430, creating the radical and expansive notions of church authority on which Leo and his successors could later build. Bishops of Rome named and claimed; these were the years in which they became popes, became heirs of Peter, became primates and pontiffs, exercised a principate, and ruled over the apostolic see (See Table 3). This was a church on the make.

  TABLE 3

  ROMAN POPES 366–468

  366–84 Damasus I

  384–99 Siricius

  399–401 Anastasius I

  401–17 Innocent I

  417–18 Zosimus

  418–22 Boniface I

  422–32 Celestine I

  432–40 Sixtus III

  440–61 Leo I

  461–68 Hilarius

  Damasus I (366–84) has a fair claim to rank as the first great pope. He grounded Roman authority in the words of Christ himself: “Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church.” He developed the idea of the sedes apostolica, the apostolic see, to which lesser churches appealed for judgment. From pagan custom, he inherited the old priestly title of pontifex, pontiff, although it would be some centuries before the popes acquired the full imperial title of pontifex maximus. He also reorganized the papal archives, an achievement that went far beyond any mere contribution to antiquarian scholarship. The archives were a rhetorical arsenal: any time a king or bishop made the slightest acknowledgment of papal prestige and power, the document went straight into the archives, ready to be retrieved when needed to prove a point a year or a century later. Some of these documents were authentic, others not. Among the influential forgeries were the Pseudo-Clementines, a collection of letters attributed to the first-century Christian Clement but actually created around 220. These documents had long appealed to the Roman church because they offered an explicit recognition of papal supremacy, with the bishops of Rome inheriting Peter’s powers to bind and loose. By the end of the fourth century, they were translated into Latin, and Clementine ideas became part of the common currency of papal rhetoric.12

  In the time of Damasus’s successor Siricius (384–99), the title of papa, or pope, came to be applied especially to the Roman pontiff, rather than merely being a generic term for a bishop. Siricius promulgated Roman authority through decretals, statements modeled on imperial edicts. Although later generations would happily invent bogus early decretals, the first authentic example comes from Siricius’s time in an edict that spells out detailed regulations for church life and policy in Spain. As Siricius boasts, “We bear the burdens of all who are oppressed, or rather the blessed apostle Peter, who in all things protects and preserves us, the heirs, as we trust, of his administration, bears them in us.” Such words would seem quite normal for popes over the following 1,600 years, but they were a startling innovation in the 380s. The Roman bishop now claimed to sit in the cathedra Petri, Peter’s throne.13

  Later popes continued this march to supremacy. Pope Innocent I (401–17) as a matter of course issued decretals to churches across the Western Empire, and the papacy was now claiming that it could not be judged by other churches. Innocent also found a new basis for asserting a far-reaching primacy in the church. The idea depends on a passage in the sixth canon of Nicea, in which the council declared that the church of Alexandria should have the same jurisdiction over its home territories—Egypt and Libya—that Rome had in its area. But what exactly was the Roman jurisdiction implied here? The context makes it clear that the territory is definitely in Italy, in regions that would formerly have been subject to the city of Rome. Under Innocent, though, the papacy claimed that the passage recognized Roman supremacy through the whole Western church. A spurious Latin version of the canons pushed these assertions still further, with a declaration that the ecclesia Romana had always had the primatum, primacy, over the whole church. Later popes proudly cited this passage as the formal recognition of Rome’s universal authority—and they continued to do so even after Eastern leaders scornfully pointed out that the words did not appear in the authoritative Greek originals.

  Between 420 and 460—the era of the christological battles—successive popes built mightily upon these foundations. At First Ephesus in 431, Pope Celestine I’s envoy explicitly used the Petrine inheritance to justify Roman authority. And when Leo became pope in 440, he consciously operated as vicar of Peter, Peter’s earthly voice: as he said, “the blessed apostle Peter does not cease from presiding over his see.” When Leo spoke—he believed—Peter spoke, and an insult to Leo was a direct blow at the fisherman. When Leo made a diplomatic approach to Dioscuros, Cyril’s successor at Alexandria, it was no mere matter of Leo writing to Dioscuros, but rather, Peter was speaking to his old secretary, Mark. Of course, he claimed, the two churches were as one on points of doctrine. As Leo wrote, optimistically, “It is wicked to believe that [Peter’s] holy disciple Mark, who was the first to govern the church of Alexandria, formed his decrees on a different line of tradition.”14

  Leo strove to transform spiritual headship into a true primacy of jurisdiction. If he was the heir of Peter, then under Roman law he inherited Peter’s rights and powers, including the ability to bind and loose, to make and break laws. He spoke as indignus haeres beati Petri, the unworthy heir of blessed Peter, and the loaded word there was heir. Leo also asserted the papal right to act as a principate, a near-imperial role first asserted in the 420s.

  Rome Recedes

  The era of the papal revolution—roughly between 370 and 460—neatly coincides with the decline of Roman imperial power in Italy and the West, and of course the two trends are closely intertwined. The weaker imperial power became in Italy, the more space appeared for a substitute authority—in the form of the church—and the greater the need for a successor. The Roman Empire’s link to the founding city shrank steadily. From the third century onward, emperors tended to make their homes elsewhere, usually close to military centers from which they could easily move to defend the frontiers. Milan, Trier (Germany), and Sirmium (in Serbia) all served as imperial capitals long before Constantine established his new city on the Bosporus, and later Western emperors favored Ravenna. The popes, then, usually did not live under the immediate shadow of the emperor or his court, and this benign neglect allowed the papal institution to develop without close interference or supervision.

  From the end of the fourth century, Roman power in the West suffered from massive barbarian incursions, which repeatedly threatened the historic capital. In 378, at the battle of Adrianople, the Romans suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Gothic-led forces, who moved progressively west. Further invasions followed the collapse of the Rhine frontier in 406. In 410, Visigothic forces sacked Rome, and Visigothic kingdoms were founded in Gaul and Spain, while a lethally powerful Vandal regime gradually took over North Africa. Britain fell away from the empire in 410. Imperial diplomacy gradually succeeded in bringing at least some of the barbarians to work within the Roman system, but the new order was deeply troubling for the church. Both Vandals and Visigoths were Arian Christians, whose church rejected the Trinitarian doctrines of the empire; and by the 420s these heretics were founding substantial new states on what had once been Roman territory. This political collapse did not cut the popes entirely off from the empire. In popular historical consciousness, the Roman Empire ended formally in 476, supposedly one of the great turning points in world affairs. In fact, this change was less epochal than it might appear, and the main alteration that occurred in 476 was that the now-sole emperor in Constantinople thought it best not to have a coemperor. Imperial power survived in Italy, although the church came to exercise many of its functions.15

  Lacking a powerful or interventionist emperor resident in Rome itself, Pope Leo was left to act very much as a sovereign might have done in earlier eras, and his well-documented career amply demonstrates the Roman church’s imperial outlook. His letters suggest a man who expected to be obeyed without question, whether he was commanding ot
her bishops in many parts of Italy and Gaul or asserting his authority across Spain and North Africa. One later editor writes of the “dictatorial strain” of much of this correspondence, and other words like “imperious” and “arbitrary” also come freely to mind. He was desperately sensitive about any hints of inferior churches seizing new powers or breaking away to follow centers other than Rome. He battled to prevent the churches of Illyricum (modern day Croatia and Albania) drifting into Constantinople’s sphere of influence. In one case, he had to deal with a dispute in Gaul, in which a synod under Bishop Hilary of Arles had deposed a bishop named Celidonius for violating canonical rules. Hilary, who had declared himself metropolitan of Gaul, was as much an empire builder as Leo himself. Celidonius appealed to Rome, forcing Hilary to make a personal appearance before the pope. This meant undertaking a trek that would not have been an easy matter in the best of circumstances but which was deadly dangerous on the barbarian-infested roads of the 440s. Even so, Leo was not satisfied. He reinstated Celidonius, limiting Hilary’s powers, and continued to intervene in the management of the province. He was acting, in fact, like a strong Roman emperor dealing with restive provinces, or like an authoritarian medieval pope.16

  But however strong the popes might have been in Italy and parts of Gaul, in the most ancient areas of Roman domination, it remained to be seen what influence they might enjoy in an empire that had moved decisively eastward in terms of demography and culture. Instead of serving as the impregnable heart of civilization, Rome itself was now an exposed outpost on the western fringes of empire. The city’s population fell from perhaps 800,000 in the fourth century to 350,000 in 450, and to just 60,000 by the 530s.17

  The political shocks had enormous cultural implications. In 330, the Roman Empire found its central axis roughly on a line from Rome to Carthage; but by 430, that axis would better be imagined as running much farther to the east, from Constantinople to Alexandria. The new geography would have been familiar to Herodotus nine hundred years earlier, or to Alexander the Great. And the Eastern world was thoroughly Greek. Greek was, of course, the oldest language of Christian thought and writing, and that dominance within the church continued after the conversion. As the empire shifted its focus, Greek steadily became the language of politics. It would not be long before “the Roman language” came to refer to Greek rather than Latin.

  Corresponding to this change was the decline of Latin, which had once been a powerful force unifying the Roman world. A linguistic barrier now cut Rome off from the debates of the East Mediterranean. Already at the fifth-century councils, Roman participants had to use interpreters, and Pope Leo spoke not a word of Greek. Eighteen months after the Council of Chalcedon had concluded, he was pleading for a Latin translation of its decisions, as “we have no very clear information about the acts of the synod…on account of the difference in language.” If they had known Greek, papal representatives would not have dared try to palm off the spurious Nicene canon about papal primacy. To put it mildly, Romans did not have the native familiarity with theological nuances that marked their counterparts in Antioch or Alexandria. When Eastern leaders insisted that popes be represented at councils, it was because of the prestige of Rome and Peter rather than for any intellectual contribution these Westerners could conceivably make.18

  Nor did Latin scholarship have much currency in the East, where all the intellectual turmoil took place. For Westerners, the early fifth century seems like a time of towering intellectual achievement through the work of St. Augustine, but his writings made next to no impact in the contemporary Greek-speaking East for several centuries. Even the City of God never penetrated the Greek-speaking world. Nor did Easterners show any awareness of the lively Christian culture in contemporary Gaul—and they certainly knew nothing about a troubled missionary bishop working at just this time, whom Westerners remember as Patrick of Ireland. In contrast, quite minor Greek pamphlets and squibs circulated rapidly in the old Hellenistic world that stretched from Libya to Mesopotamia, and they were widely discussed shortly after their appearance.19

  In other ways, too, the Roman church was now far out of the loop of church politics. All the councils that shaped the church from the fourth century onward occurred in the Eastern empire, and usually within easy striking distance of Constantinople itself. Of the first seven general councils recognized by the whole church, three were held at Constantinople itself (381, 553, 680), two at Nicea (325, 787), one at Chalcedon (451), and one at Ephesus (431). Ephesus was also the setting for the controversial council of 449. The only one of these locations that was not in the immediate vicinity of the capital was Ephesus, some 250 miles from Constantinople. The sites were chosen for the convenience of the court and the leading members of the church hierarchy. Being so far removed from the new center of ecclesiastical action forced Roman popes to react to decisions that had already been taken, rather than leading the way.

  Rome was now just one player in a four- or five-power game, and by no means the strongest. Who knew how long the see of Peter might hold on to a primacy that was already looking anachronistic? In response, the Roman popes had to play the poor hand available to them. This meant exploiting differences between rival churches, while forming alliances with other centers with whom they shared common interests. But above all, it meant playing for all it was worth the memory of Peter, and the apostolic guarantee of strict orthodoxy.

  Alexandria’s Pharaohs

  If Rome was fighting the threat of decline, the main question for the Alexandrian church was just how high its ambitions could rise. For over thirty years, Alexandria’s patriarch Cyril played an aggressive and interventionist role in theological debates, and after he died in 444, his successors kept his tradition vigorously alive. So activist were they, so obstreperous, that it is often easy to forget that Alexandria was not in truth the capital of the Christian world or that the patriarchs were not its absolute rulers. In more recent times, the patriarchs had come to serve as the effective voices of a region as well as a faith, and they based their political power on tumultuous mobs and effective militias. If exasperated observers thought that the patriarchs acted like pharaohs or Hellenistic god-kings, these churchmen had excellent grounds for their pretensions.20

  The Alexandrian church claimed a distinguished ancestry with a list of rulers that traced back to St. Mark the Evangelist, but we know very little about the succession of orthodox bishops before the famous theologian and philosopher Clement of Alexandria, around 190. This obscurity may reflect some embarrassed rewriting by later church historians. In fact, Alexandria had a very distinguished Christian history from apostolic times, but much of it was, by later standards, wildly heretical and overly willing to draw on the insights of pagan philosophy or Judaism. Egypt was the home of the greatest early Gnostics, Basilides and Valentinus, and probably several others, and before Clement, no non-Gnostic Christian enjoyed anything like the same degree of prestige in Alexandria. Only later, as orthodox non-Gnostics secured their position, did they feel the need to invent a respectable spiritual ancestry for themselves, in the form of an artificial list of suitably orthodox bishops.21

  Alexandrian thinkers were thoroughly used to theologies that exalted Christ as a supernatural being. The fact that our oldest Christian manuscripts were all found in Egypt may just mean that ancient documents survived better in that dry climate, but many famous texts, canonical or heretical, probably did originate in that explosive cultural mix. Alexandria would have been a natural home for the gospel of John. John prominently uses the idea of Christ as the Logos, the creative Word of God, which draws on the ideas of Alexandria’s greatest Jewish philosopher, Philo. Egyptian Gnostics loved John.22

  Understanding those ancient roots also tells us a great deal about the likely attitudes of fifth-century church leaders. Cyril and his contemporaries were proud of Egypt’s overwhelming Christian past and, beyond that, of its roots in an Egyptian culture that, as far as they knew, was the world’s oldest and most influential. Even
today, Egypt’s Coptic Church preserves the ancient language spoken in the time of the pharaohs and the pyramid builders, and its calendar, too, dates back to pharaonic times. The very word Coptic comes from Aigyptos, Egyptian: the church was thoroughly rooted in Egyptian soil and speech. The Coptic Church still divides the year into the four seasons observed by ancient Egyptians, with appropriate liturgies and blessings for the transition points. But at the same time, the presence of so many pre- and non-Christian influences seemed potentially threatening in a melting-pot Alexandrian culture that so naturally mingled cultures and traditions and favored religious syncretism.23

  Nervousness about cultural drift helps explain the ferocity of Egyptian church leaders against other religions, pagan or Jewish. In 367, Athanasius issued the strictest condemnation to date of noncanonical Christian gospels and scriptures, leading many to be concealed or destroyed. This may have been the point at which the famous Nag Hammadi gospels were hidden to forestall destruction. At the end of the fourth century, his successor, Theophilus, led Christian mobs in a comprehensive assault on the pagan temples. Not content with demolishing statues and buildings, the church organized public exhibitions to show how the pagan priests had contrived some of the miraculous tricks by which they overawed the simple. In 391, Theophilus led an assault on the Serapeum at Alexandria, one of the greatest pagan centers of the ancient world. Such shows were extraordinarily powerful in reinforcing Christian loyalties, in proving the superiority of the Christian Lord to the long-dreaded pagan powers. It is exactly such ritual destructions of pagan objects that have given so much momentum to Christian growth in modern-day Africa.24 This aggressive attitude to other faiths also suggests why Cyril and his followers would fight desperately against any version of Christian theology that might offer the slightest concession to pagan ideas of multiple gods. Egyptian Christians must above all defend the oneness of God’s nature.