The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
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It has often been implied that pagan and Christian religion operated at different levels, with paganism paying more attention to public ritual (such as sacrifice), Christianity paying more attention to belief. This would be an overstatement if it was put too crudely, for both religious communities practised both, but there is an element of truth in it all the same. Christianity was also concerned with setting spiritual boundaries - between sacred and secular, or between good and bad demons - that were more nuanced (or fuzzier) to most pagans; and it was initially less committed to public and collective activity, too (though this would quickly change). There are some parallels here to the Reformation Protestant challenge to Catholic Christianity in the sixteenth century (parallels which Protestants quite consciously sought to play up). They are there too in the nineteenth-century ‘modernist’ critique of the public world of the ancien régime, as characterized by Michel Foucault. There is, that is to say, a tension between promoting collective ritual which brings social and moral solidarity, and trying to change people’s minds; this tension has long existed in human history, and in some societies one side gains ascendancy over the other, for a time. In the late Roman context, it would probably be best to say that this tension existed, not only between pagan and Christian, but inside Christianity itself; for Christian attitudes to the public did quickly change, and the religious enthusiasm involved in festivals and pilgrimages, indeed in churchgoing, was by no means the same as the divine grace or mental discipline, or both, thought by rigorists to be necessary to attain individual salvation. This was something of which Christian writers who were bishops, and therefore had to straddle both, were well aware. This tension in some of our authors indeed provides much of their interest.
Changing people’s minds was harder, however, and, at the level of everyday morality and values, Christianization changed much less. For example, apart from the occasional rigorist criticism, for example by Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 395), there is no sign whatsoever that legal unfreedom was regarded as wrong by most Christians, despite Christianity’s explicit egalitarianism; anyway, freeing slaves (manumission) as a pious act at death, common in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, had impeccable pagan antecedents. Opposition to social hierarchies based on wealth, or to judicial torture, was only developed at any length by heretical movements. Every single Christian writer inveighed against sexual misbehaviour (some against all sexual activity, invoking virginity as superior to marriage, as Jerome (d. 419) did), but it is unclear that this had any effect on daily actions. Christians also campaigned against divorce, however, and this did become increasingly difficult in law, and, in the West at least, eventually impossible later on in the early Middle Ages; practices which legislation could reach were more likely to change, hence also the abolition of amphitheatre games. Family-level assumptions, by contrast, including about gender roles, did not change greatly, as we shall see later in this chapter; nor did the civic values of Roman public life. One important exception was charity to the poor, which had been a mainstay of Christian community activity since its early years as a persecuted minority. It remained a major responsibility for good Christians, more than it had been for pagans, and was also a major role for churches (and for the bishops who ran the principal churches in each city) as they increased in wealth, as well as providing a justification for that wealth, given that the Christian gospels put so much stress on poverty. This emphasis on charity would later be inherited by Islam too.
These shifts in cult practices and religious culture went together with three other important innovations brought by Christianity to the Roman world: the church as an institution; the political importance of correct belief; and new social spaces for religious rigorists and ascetics. Let us look at these in turn.
Pagan religion did not depend on a very elaborate institutional structure, and the cults of each city were all organized locally; rabbinic Judaism, too, was very decentralized (Jews did have a single patriarch until around 425, but it is unclear how wide his powers were). Christianity, however, had a complex hierarchy, partly matching that of the state. By 400 there were four patriarchs, at Rome, Constantinople (since 381), Antioch and Alexandria (a fifth, Jerusalem, was added in 451), who oversaw the bishops of each city. The patriarch of Rome was already called by the honorific title papa, ‘pope’, but it was only after the eighth century that this was restricted to the pope in Rome. Bishops were soon arrayed in two levels, with metropolitan bishops (called in later centuries archbishops) at an intermediate level, overseeing and consecrating the bishops of each secular province. Inside the dioceses of each bishop, which normally covered the secular territory of their city, bishops had authority over the clerics of other public churches (although privately founded churches and monasteries were often autonomous, a situation which produced endless disputes and rivalry for the next millennium). The church in the fourth and fifth centuries became an elaborate structure, with perhaps a hundred thousand clerics of different types, more than the civil administration, and steadily increasing in wealth as a result of pious gifts. It was not part of the state, but its wealth and empire-wide institutional cohesion made it an inevitable partner for emperors and prefects, and a strong and influential informal authority in cities; the cathedral church by 500 was often the largest local landowner (and therefore patron), and, unlike in the case of private family wealth, its stability could be guaranteed - bishops were not allowed to alienate church property. It was ecclesiastical wealth and local status that led the episcopate to become part of élite career structures by the fifth century in Gaul; this process took place later in Italy and some of the eastern provinces, but by 550 or so it was normal everywhere. Even in a church context, bishops generally identified themselves with their diocese first, with wider ecclesiastical institutions only secondarily. But they were linked to the wider church hierarchy all the same: they could be called to order and dismissed by metropolitans and by the councils of bishops that steadily became more frequent, whether empire-wide (the ‘ecumenical’ councils) or at the regional level, in Spain or Gaul or Africa. The fact that this institutional structure did not depend on the empire, and was above all separately funded, meant that it could survive the political fragmentation of the fifth century, and the church was indeed the Roman institution that continued with least change into the early Middle Ages; the links between regions became weaker, but the rest remained intact. The problem of the relationship between the church as an institution and secular political power has existed ever since in Christian polities, and has often caused considerable conflicts, as it already did in the fifth century, and would again in the eleventh, in the Reformation, and in the post-Enlightenment states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Pagan political practice valued religious conformity, but did not have sharp divisions over variations in religious belief. Here, Christianity was very different. From early in its history its adherents argued over theology and accused each other of deviant belief, ‘heresy’, and in the fourth century this became an affair of state. What may well have surprised Constantine most on his conversion to Christianity was the internal conflict in the religion he had chosen, and the importance to its members of winning without any compromise. Constantine took seriously the task of achieving Christian unity, but he did not succeed (this may have surprised him too). To his successors, unity around a single correct view became increasingly important, including for the welfare of the empire as a collectivity; by the end of the fourth century religious deviance was thus politically dangerous and needed to be extirpated by law. The laws against pagans were polished first on Christian heretics, that is, those on the losing side in the great theoretical battles, and they were always far more systematically used against heresy. So heresy was both increasingly dangerous and increasingly common in the late empire. It was regarded as a problem in later centuries, too (particularly in the thirteenth-century West), but only the Reformation matches the intensity of the religious disputes of the period 300-600.
Donatism was the only home-grown division seriously to disturb the late Roman West. It did mark one concern that was more of an issue for the Latin than for the Greek church: the personal purity of the men who consecrated others and who presided over the eucharist, the central ceremony of Christian worship. The next western heresy, ‘Pelagianism’, declared heretical by the emperor Honorius in 418 and (rather unwillingly) by the western patriarch, Pope Zosimus of Rome, in the same year, as a result of the pressure put on them by Augustine and Alypius, was also related to issues of personal purity. Pelagius argued that a committed Christian could avoid sin through God-given free will, which Augustine regarded as impossible. Pelagians were never more than a minority, however, and the most lasting effect of this division was Augustine’s development of his theory of predestination to salvation through God’s grace, which remained controversial (and misunderstood, particularly in Gaul and Italy) but did not result in further declarations of heresy. It may be relevant here to note that the question of the purity of clerics remained important in the West. In the West, but not in the East, all clergy were supposed to avoid sexual activity, according to councils as early as 400 (in the East, this only applied to bishops, and only after 451). Not that western clergy always matched up to theory, and there were legally married clerics in many western regions into the late eleventh century, but the principle that priests should be sacrally distinct from their congregations was established early.
In the East, the most divisive issue was quite different: it was the nature of Christ. Constantine also found that there was dissension between Patriarch Alexander of Alexandria and his priest Arios over whether the Son was identical in substance, or equal, to the Father in the Trinity; Alexander maintained he was so, and Arios maintained he was not. Constantine, who did not think the issue particularly important, called a council of bishops to Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council, which, remarkably (it was the only ecumenical council to manage this), got both sides to agree on a formulation, the Nicene creed, essentially supporting Alexander. Some extreme followers of Alexander, however, notably Athanasios (d. 373), Alexander’s successor, refused to maintain communion with Arios, even though he had signed up to the Nicene creed, and the dispute broke out again. Versions of Christian belief closer to those whom Athanasios called ‘Arians’ were popular in many parts of the East, notably at Constantinople, including with the mid-century emperors, Constantius II and Valens; it was not by any means obvious to everyone that the members of the Trinity were all equal. Athanasios was also personally unpopular for his violent style, and had widespread support only in the West. But a new generation of Nicene supporters gained force in the 370s, thanks in particular to Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Anatolia (d. 379), and his associates. At Valens’ death at Adrianople in 378, a western ally of Basil became eastern emperor, Theodosius I, and his ecumenical council at Constantinople in 381 finally declared the Nicene creed to be orthodoxy. This paradoxically (but not uniquely among heresies) caused ‘Arianism’ itself to crystallize as a worked-out religious system, in effect for the first time. All the same, it lost imperial patronage and thus wider support thereafter (although, in the eastern capital, not until Patriarch John Chrysostom’s vigorous preaching in 398-404), except among the Goths and, by extension, other ‘barbarian’ groups in the North.
The Nicene victory meant that Christ, though human and capable of suffering, was seen as fully divine as well; but how were humanity and divinity to be combined? This was the major focus of fifth-century debates, which were in many respects power-struggles between Alexandria and Antioch, with Constantinople generally on Antioch’s side. Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria (412-44) argued that the human and divine elements in Christ’s nature could not be separated; Antiochenes such as Nestorios, patriarch of Constantinople (428-31), saw them as distinct. The danger in Cyril’s position, which we call ‘Monophysite’, was that Christ would lose his humanity altogether; the danger in Nestorios’ position was that he would turn into two people. Neither danger had been realized yet, but opponents of each believed it had been. The third ecumenical council, at Ephesos in 431, a theatre of remarkably cynical management by Cyril, condemned and deposed Nestorios. Ephesos also legitimated the cult of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, ‘mother of God’, a formulation Nestorios in particular opposed, but one which has dominated most Christian churches since; the great councils as a whole did not only argue about Christology. But the Alexandrian attempt to go after all the Antiochenes, one by one (notably Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, who was briefly deposed in 449), rebounded on them, largely because of western opposition, focused on the actions and writings of Pope Leo I (440-61), and also because the Alexandrians had alienated the empress Pulcheria, their supporter at Ephesos. A fourth council at Chalcedon in 451 rejected the Alexandrian ‘Monophysite’ position (while maintaining a rejection of Nestorios), and set out a ruling that Christ existed ‘in two natures’, divine and human, while remaining one person.
This established an orthodoxy that dominated the West and the Byzantine heartland ever after. But it did not end the disputes, for Monophysitism had grass-roots support that previous losing interpretations did not have, in particular in most of Egypt, increasingly in Syria and Palestine, and in Armenia. Emperors, themselves sometimes personally sympathetic to Monophysitism (as with Anastasius, and also the empress Theodora, Justinian’s powerful wife), saw the Chalcedonian- Monophysite split as a political rather than a theological issue, and attempted several times to promote intermediate positions between the two: Zeno’s Henotikon in 482, Justinian’s fifth council at Constantinople in 553, Heraclius’ ‘Monothelete’ pronouncement, the Ekthesis, in 638. These did not work because there was less and less common ground between the two sides (even though the issues at stake became increasingly arcane); by the late sixth century, indeed, the Monophysite provinces were establishing an entire parallel episcopal hierarchy to confront the Chalcedonians. The emperors found themselves anathematized by both sides, and also faced schism with the West, which was uncompromisingly Chalcedonian. (When the popes of Rome were bullied into accepting the council of Constantinople in 554, they too faced opposition from much of the West, the so-called Three Chapters schism, and it took them a hundred and fifty years to end it.) Arianism continued as the Christianity of ‘barbarian’ groups, notably Goths, Vandals and eventually Lombards, into the seventh century. ‘Nestor ianism’ continued too - in more extreme forms than Nestorios had ever proposed - but mostly outside the empire, in Persia and as far east as China. But it was Monophysitism that divided Roman Christians most radically and completely, and the division was never healed.
It is impossible to characterize these conflicts accurately in a few words, for the theology at issue is amazingly intricate, depending on tight definitions and Platonist philosophical developments of concepts which would take many pages to set out in English (it was,
furthermore, a debate which made most sense in Greek even then; Leo I was the last Latin-speaker really to grasp and contribute to it). Such detailed characterizations do not belong here. But it is important to stress that they did matter. Pagan observers found these debates ridiculous, even insane, as well as amazingly badly behaved, but having an accurate and universally agreed definition of God became increasingly important for Christians between 300 and 550, not least because the political power of bishops steadily increased. It is relevant that they mattered more in the East, where technical philosophical debate was longer-rooted in intellectual life, but with the ‘barbarian’ conquests Christological issues came to the West as well, and Arian-Catholic debates were bitter there, too; anyway, the Augustinian problematic which dominated theology in the West, centred on predestination and divine grace, was no less complex, even though it sidestepped Christological debate. It is of course impossible to say how many people properly understood the issues at stake at, say, Chalcedon: perhaps only a few hundred, although one should not underestimate the theological sophistication of the citizens of the great cities, exposed as they were to the sermons of some high-powered thinkers. But the problem of the real divinity of a human god, who had even died, at the Crucifixion, was at least an issue that would have made sense in the late Roman world, where the cult of the emperors as gods was still remembered (indeed, it was still practised by some) and the divine being was not, in the fifth century at least, as distant from humanity as he (or they) would be in some versions of Christianity.