Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  Beyond the Emperors

  Imperial politics meant much more than the office of the emperor himself and involved a complex world of court, bureaucracy, and royal family. Roman government was evolving into a military-ecclesiastical-courtier complex, a pattern it would retain through the Byzantine period.2

  The empire became increasingly absolutist. From the third century, the emperor gave up the pretense of being just the first citizen, the princeps, and was openly proclaimed as lord, dominus, an absolute sovereign, untrammeled by republican institutions. The Greek word, which gives its meaning to another familiar English term, was despotes. The imperial court imitated the styles of absolutist Persia and the ancient god-kings of the Middle East, while the language of divinity permeated imperial life. The imperial finance minister bore the title of Comes Sacrarum Largitionum, the Count of Sacred Largeses; the empire’s senior legal official—in modern terms, roughly, the attorney-general—was the Quaestor of the Sacred Palace.3

  After Theodosius I, the Great, died in 395, his dynasty remained in power in both East and West. The fact that his immediate successors enjoyed such very long reigns might mislead us into thinking that these must have been eras of peace and stability. Just two incumbents held the Western throne for most of the period from 395 to 455, an impressive span of sixty years. One of Theodosius I’s grandsons, Valentinian III, ruled the Western empire from 425 to 455, while another, Theodosius II, held the East from 408 through 450. But, in fact, this was anything but an enviable time of easygoing prosperity, and barbarian invasions repeatedly threatened to destroy both Eastern and Western empires. The long reigns rather suggested that at least some so-called despots—by no means all—were largely figureheads, so irrelevant to public affairs that they were scarcely worth replacing. Valentinian III was at best childish and petulant, and probably mentally unstable.4

  Power within the empire had moved elsewhere, above all to the military, to quasi-independent warlords who served the Roman state but who naturally had their own agendas. This was a massive historical change from the older system, in which the army had been an integral part of the Roman state. By the fourth century, though, military forces were largely recruited and hired from external nations and tribes, who could handle the radically changed styles of mobile warfare that marked the great age of the barbarian migrations. Although each new wave of intruders posed its own problem, the most destabilizing force was the Huns, fast-moving horsemen using a deadly new type of bow. The empire was enduring a thoroughgoing revolution in military affairs.5

  The Romans successfully employed some of these barbarians as allies and mercenaries, while others ran out of control and took over whole portions of the empire for themselves. Some peoples oscillated between the two courses, sometimes being predators, sometimes faithful defenders. Some warlords became kingmakers. From 430 through 470, the power behind the throne of the Eastern empire was Aspar, a member of the Alan nation that derived from eastern Europe, beyond the Roman frontier. As Magister Militum, commander in chief, the fate of the empire depended on him and whichever of his military protégés he chose to place in high office, including that of emperor. The Western empire, meanwhile, relied on the half-barbarian Aetius, the de facto military ruler of the Western empire from 433 through 450. Aetius owed his success to his close familiarity with the Hunnish tribes and his ability to deploy their own tactics against those terrifying invaders.6

  Old and new ruling peoples intermarried freely. Although the Roman Empire had never aspired to racial purity, by the fifth century it was looking surprisingly multicultural and pan-European. In the West particularly, ruling elites represented the kind of Germanic/Latin blend that would dominate the region for the next thousand years. The Visigothic king Athaulf claimed that he had originally wanted to replace the Roman Empire, Romania, with a new Germanic Reich of Gothia, but he eventually despaired of making such a radical change and decided instead to use Gothic vigor as the foundation for a restored Nova Romania. What actually occurred was not too far from that design. Barbarian lords—Goths, Franks, and others—married their daughters and sisters into the imperial elite, so that a warlord like Aetius could plausibly hope to see a grandson in the imperial purple. Even the Vandal ruler Gaiseric, overlord of the North African kingdom that so alarmed the empire, married his son to the daughter of the Western emperor Valentinian. Barbarian influence in imperial politics was actually stronger than we might think from merely looking at the personal names of emperors or high officials. From 457, the new emperor bore the impeccably Greek and philosophical name of Zeno, but his real name—barely pronounceable to civilized Greeks—was Tarasicodissa. He stemmed from the Isaurian highland tribes of Asia Minor, possibly relatives of the modern Kurds.

  The courts themselves contained other centers of power. Roman sovereigns entrusted great power to eunuchs, who would not try to seize power in the interests of their descendants, yet that limitation did not prevent eunuch officials from struggling constantly for influence. In this world of backstairs politics, what mattered was not one’s birth or background or, often, ideology, but who had best access to the emperor and his family. This access was commonly sold to the highest bidder. Court politics were a matter of ins and outs, with outsiders adopting whatever policies and alliances might best serve to destabilize and discredit existing favorites. In some cases, courtiers and court officials so controlled access to the emperor, so channeled the information available to him, that the leader of the dominant court faction became a kind of shadow emperor.7

  The power of the eunuchs reached new heights under the long-lived emperor Theodosius II (408–50). One eunuch, Antiochus, acted as his regent from 408 to 414, while the emperor was still a small child. In later years, too, Theodosius II “was under the control of his eunuchs in everything.”8 In the 440s, the eunuch official Chrysaphius dominated the court and used this power to promote Monophysite doctrine within the empire.

  State as Church, Church as State

  Another potent new force was the church, and the story of church-state conflict in Alexandria suggests the difficulty of absorbing the new religious reality within Roman state traditions. Modern observers find it hard to appreciate how slim were the distinctions that late Roman society drew between the church and the world, between religious life and the everyday doings of society. What we today would call religious issues served as vehicles for pursuing causes and grievances that were just as much political or economic in nature. That linkage of issues helps explain why ordinary people became so passionately involved in theological struggles.9

  The rising popularity of the church coincided with the declining power and prestige of the state. Western historians have long debated the causes of the empire’s decline and fall and have resisted simple, single-cause explanations, pointing instead to combinations of different types of weaknesses and stress. Some modern historians turn the question on its head, preferring to ask how the empire could possibly have kept going as long as it did, faced as it was by such a nightmare concatenation of military, social, and economic threats. But however we assess the role of the different threats, there is no doubt that they all were at their height in the era of Ephesus and Chalcedon, which was also the age of Attila the Hun.10

  The imperial crisis had a direct impact on the lives of everyday people and ordinary Christian believers. Much of the impact was fiscal, as maintaining the empire became just too expensive a proposition. Throughout these years, external enemies repeatedly threatened the empire—Germanic barbarians, Persians, and Huns. These menaces forced the empire, as a matter of survival, to spend ever larger resources on its military apparatus, on supplying armies and fleets, maintaining fortresses and garrisons, buying the friendship of barbarian tribes, and paying tribute to buy off dangerous raiders. The imperial institution itself became ever more expensive, with the rich display and dress expected of emperors, all the court ritual, and the cost of a sizable bureaucracy.

  Even in the best circumstances, those press
ures would have stretched the capacity of the treasury and put enormous demands on the general tax burden. But in the fifth century, the regions available to pay taxes and tribute were shrinking steadily, with the secession or destruction of whole provinces. Even when the empire maintained its power over an area like the Balkans, Attila’s repeated looting left the inhabitants with little ability to pay. Heavy tax demands fell on the remaining provinces and cities, which became progressively more disenchanted with civil authority, with its soldiers and tax collectors.

  Nor did the empire offer much pretense of equal treatment, any sense of shared suffering. In Gaul, the prophetic Christian Salvian wrote that the empire was dying or drawing its last breath, “strangled by the cords of taxation as if by the hands of brigands” but even at such a time, “still a great number of wealthy men are found, the burden of whose taxes is borne by the poor; that is, very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor.” In an oft-quoted passage, a Greek merchant cited these economic burdens to explain just why he had opted out of the empire and defected to the Huns: “The exaction of the taxes is very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others, because the laws are practically not valid against all classes. A transgressor who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his injustice, while a poor man…undergoes the legal penalty.” More than ever, the state and its mechanisms became the face of the enemy. It was only natural, then, to turn instead to the comforting face of the church.11

  By the start of the fifth century, churches had convincingly established themselves as clear forces of authority in individual cities, matching and in many cases overwhelming the symbols of secular power. The empire recognized the dignity and independence of the church by giving clerics a separate justice system, granting clergy the right to be tried in their own special courts. In the East, this right extended to bishops only, but Western rulers applied it to all clergy, of whatever rank. Bishops were now vital channels of government and were active in political and economic affairs as much as the strictly religious. As the Roman Empire crumbled in the West, local power in cities and regions passed to an alliance of counts and bishops, a pattern that would remain in place for a thousand years and more. In both East and West, institutional Christianity powerfully asserted its authority through the physical presence of church buildings and monasteries, which were now experiencing a massive building boom, supported by the empire and other secular magnates. At last, churches were beginning to challenge and even overtop the mighty temples, which were duly raided for building stone.12

  The extensive social services provided by the church cemented popular loyalties. By the fifth century, wealthy lay people were providing very large gifts and bequests to the churches as a means of promoting their eternal well-being. People gave money to help prisoners, for the ransom of captives (crucially important during wars and barbarian assaults), and for relieving victims of poverty and pestilence. Bishops distributed these moneys according to their discretion, and their charitable activities gave them immense prestige. If the state was always demanding money, the church cultivated a reputation for always giving it away. The empire might boast of its sacred largess, but the church actually practiced it.13

  Just how substantial were the sums involved emerges from the frequent corruption charges that regularly surfaced in intrachurch fights, as each faction tried to make its enemies seem as greedy as possible. For present purposes, the truth of such charges matters less than the scale of wealth and patronage suggested. In 449, Edessa’s bishop Ibas was accused of multiple offenses, mainly involving diverting charitable gifts to family members. And what gifts! They made up “an immense sum,” “the bequests and the offerings, the contributions from every source, and the collection of dedicated crosses of gold and silver.” His nephew, another bishop, reportedly gave all his money to a woman friend, who became rich lending the money out at heavy interest. The churches had vast capacity to help or harm, in the material world no less than the spiritual.14

  We can easily understand the deep popular loyalty that clerical leaders attracted and the violent partisan contests that regularly arose over matters of succession and promotion. Clergy themselves were famously partisan, and not just in Alexandria. Constantinople’s clergy were notorious for their “spirit of ambitious rivalry,” and worse, they could expect mob support. When the city’s archbishop died in 434, the emperor appointed a successor almost overnight, for excellent practical reasons. Desperately anxious “to prevent the disturbances in the church which usually attend the election of a bishop,” he ordered the bishops who happened to be in the city to ordain a new incumbent, Proclus, even before his predecessor was actually buried. Tumult and rioting were natural ways for ordinary Christians to show their devotion to the institutional church.15

  God’s Warriors

  The church’s authority went far beyond its material resources. The people of the late Roman world believed firmly that they faced the assaults of evil spiritual powers, powers that could only be confronted by heroic spiritual champions. This meant above all the holy men and women who proliferated across the empire, the ascetics and hermits, monks and stylites, whose ostentatious rejection of the world allowed them to challenge the forces of evil. By the fifth century, the growing horrors of the secular world were encouraging mass defections into the spiritual life, as monasticism offered a whole alternative society.16

  In the language of the time, monks and ascetics were holy warriors, engaged in constant religious combat, or else spiritual athletes. It was exactly in this period that celebrity saints took to living atop pillars, their food lifted to them daily by faithful disciples. Around 420, Simeon Stylites began occupying the pillartop where he would remain for some thirty incredible years. For the Christian public, rich and poor, such absolute devotion proved beyond doubt that a man like Simeon was close to God, and they anxiously sought his advice.17

  The amazing popular devotion that such figures attracted shows the prevailing distrust of the material world, and especially of sexuality: true holiness must involve an absolute rejection of these seductive temptations. From this point of view, the ideal Christian was not only celibate, but must also reject as far as possible any form of material comfort, including any food beyond what was absolutely necessary to keep the person alive. They were to be “tombless corpses,” dead men walking. Ascetics had a charismatic power far greater than that of any secular figure, and the best that a lay Christian could do was to try and copy them. Looking at such an ideal must make us look very suspiciously at modern-day claims that Christianity is inextricably linked to any kind of family values. In this era, Christian values meant rejecting one’s family as thoroughly as possible.18

  Just how far this estrangement from the worldly might go is suggested by the experience of the monk Severus, one of the most influential Christian figures of the sixth century and a founding father of Syria’s Monophysite church. When he became bishop of Antioch in 512, he was appalled by the luxurious living practiced by his predecessors. His first step was to close the episcopal kitchens and dismiss the cooks, so that henceforward, he would live on the cheapest and nastiest bread he could buy in the marketplace. He also destroyed the baths, an action that his admirers compared to the ancient Old Testament kings’ sacking temples of Baal. What place did the vanity of bodily hygiene have in a proper Christian regime? Cleanliness was very far from godliness. He was just as horrified to learn that earlier bishops had even slept in beds, and that practice, too, had to change. Instead, “he practiced lying down on the earth, refraining from washing, performing the offices with long psalmody, eating vegetables.”19

  In a time of general political and social crisis, such otherworldly figures acquired overwhelming authority and commanded respect for their ability to lead their supporters and sympathizers to salvation. The fact that Simeon the Stylite supported the Council of Chalcedon mattered enormously for that cause. Quite apart from the spiritual superstars, their ascetic sacrifices meant
that ordinary monks also attracted popular awe and love, which made them a potent force in a city like Constantinople. Significantly for the political story, the upsurge of monasticism was much more rapid in the eastern portions of the empire, where the trend began, than in the west. At least before the sixth century, Roman popes and Western bishops did not face the task of disciplining legions of unruly monks, as was common in Syria and Egypt. Nor were they as tempted to deploy them in factional combat against secular officials or rival churchmen.20

  In the East, though, holy men and women revolutionized the political world and served as a potent destabilizing force. Although they did not quite operate outside the law, in practice their charismatic authority gave them wide latitude to challenge official policies and to organize and channel popular resentment. When they spoke out on matters of theology or church politics, the world listened, and not merely the poor masses of city or countryside. Offending the empire could at its worst mean loss of life or property, but willfully disobeying the monks and ascetics would lead to everlasting suffering. In any conflict between spiritual and secular power, the church had immense advantages.

  Holy Women

  But if the church acted politically, the empire clearly conceived of itself in religious terms. The empire’s rulers themselves thoroughly accepted the Christian worldview, and indeed personified charismatic notions of power. Although it was not until the 450s that patriarchs actually began crowning emperors, the notion of a holy empire absolutely rooted in Christian symbolism and ideology was much older. For better or worse, the concept of a Christian Empire went far beyond rhetorical verbiage.21