by Sean Martin
Satan was originally an accusing angel in Hebrew thought,12 but had the good fortune, like Ahriman before him, to be promoted. In the Book of Job, the earliest Old Testament book in which he has a prominent role,13 Satan is one of the ‘sons of God’ (Job 1.6) who serve God in heaven. God asks Satan for a progress report on what he has been up to of late. Satan replies ‘I have been walking here and there, roaming around the earth’ (Job 1.7). God asks Satan if he has noticed the devout Job, describing him as His most faithful servant. Satan wonders if Job would still serve God if he, Job, had everything taken away from him. God concedes the point, and lets Satan descend to Earth to begin testing Job.
In a rapid sequence of calamities that could rightly be called Old Testament in their severity, Job has his donkeys stolen by Sabeans (Job 1.15), his sheep (and attendant shepherds) are suddenly struck by lightning and killed a verse later, while, in verse seventeen, Chaldeans make off with his camels. Before Job has time to react, another breathless servant comes running with news even worse: a storm has destroyed the house that Job’s children were feasting in; all were killed. Job tears his clothes in grief, shaves his head and, from a position face down on the floor, praises the Lord for taking that which He had originally given.
Satan returns to heaven, and God points out to him that, despite the fact that Satan has done his worst to Job, Job’s faith is unshaken. God feels that He has won the toss, but Satan, not to be outdone by his employer, asks God if Job’s faith will be as strong if his body were to be attacked. Once more, God allows Satan to test Job, on the condition that he doesn’t kill the poor man. This time, Satan causes sores to break out all over Job’s body. Rather than seek sound medical advice, Job decides to scrape at his sores with a piece of broken pottery. Once again, Job rejoices in his suffering, and Satan retires, temporarily, from the narrative.
Satan plays the role of a trickster in the Book of Job, albeit one of a rather cruel bent. There is no doubt that he is still, essentially, a heavenly servant of some kind: if Satan is not actually doing God’s bidding, then at least God seems content to let Satan get up to his tricks in the earthly realm. It is not until the Second Book of Chronicles, written sometime towards the close of the Achaemenid period (which ended in 330 BC), that Satan steps out from the shadow of the Almighty to become a force set firmly against God and His creation. He – Satan – does so in a rather interesting way, as he plays the role once taken by God Himself in an earlier telling of the story.14 The story in question is of the census of the tribes of Israel, first recounted in the Second Book of Samuel, Chapter 24: the Lord, being angry yet again with Israel, forces David to number her peoples. David’s army – who are to do the actual counting – are none too happy, but comply with their king’s command. After nine months and twenty days, in which they have been all over Israel, they return to Jerusalem, the census complete. At this point, David has a crisis of conscience, and tells God that he feels that the census has been a terrible sin. Unfortunately for David and the people of Israel, God agrees. He gives David three choices to punish the sin: three years of famine;15 three months of running away from his enemies; or three days of pestilence throughout the land. David is unable to decide, and casts himself at the mercy of his Lord. His Lord, however, is not at His most merciful, and smites the land with three days’ plague, in which 70,000 Israelites perish. When the story is retold in Second Chronicles, however, it is Satan, not God, who urges David to take the census. It makes no difference: the results are, for the unfortunate Israelites, the same.
Quite why Satan went from being an accusing angel to emerging – around the end of the Achaemenid period – as the adversary of both God and Man, is still something of a mystery. One possible explanation for this change is linked with the situation in Israel after the Babylonish Captivity ended. It has been suggested16 that, when the exiled tribes returned home, friction was generated between them and the tribes who had stayed; the exiles felt that it was they who were the true children of God, for they had remained true to the Torah and had suffered the punishment of exile to prove it. Matters came to a head in 168 BC, when the Seleucid ruler of Israel, King Antiochus Epiphanes, embarked on an anti-Semitic purge. Rebellion quickly spread, and when Antiochus’s forces were defeated, it was the hardline descendants of the former exiles who gained control of the Temple. To them, the likes of the liberal pro-Hellenic Hasmonean dynasty were as much the enemy as the Seleucids, and it was perhaps these ongoing tensions within Israel that led to Satan, formerly one of God’s angels, becoming anathematised in the same way that the hardliners were excoriating the Hasmoneans for, as they saw it, their treachery and betrayal.
Essenes, Gnostics and the First Christians
If Dualism has beginnings that are obscured by the mists of time, then the origins of Christianity itself are likewise semi-obscured by the passage of the centuries. The Cathars claimed descent from early Christianity, before the Roman Church became the religion’s dominant form. Roman rule of Israel – which began in 63 BC – was facing increasing resistance from various groups within Israel. Most notable among them were the Essenes, a radical Jewish group based in the caves of Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea. It has been suggested by various writers that both John the Baptist and Jesus himself were at one time members of the Dead Sea community before beginning their respective ministries. While this is debatable, it is known that the Essenes sought to establish a new covenant with God, as they believed that Israel’s sins had all but invalidated the old covenant (given by God to Abraham). According to Roman historians like Josephus and Philo, the Essenes were divided between those who had taken full vows – which involved living at Qumran and adhering to a strict life of celibacy, prayer and ritual – and those who were associate members who, while Believers, lived in towns, plied ordinary trades and married. The Cathars – like their immediate forebears, the Bogomils – would also structure their church in this way.
In further foreshadowings of Catharism, the Essenes’ worldview was essentially dualist, in that they saw the world as the battleground between the forces of heaven and hell, and that man himself is the microcosm of this war: ‘the spirits of truth and falsehood struggle within the human heart… According to his share in truth and right, thus a man hates lies; and according to his share in the lot of deceit, thus he hates the truth.’17 They also insisted that what mattered was not one’s ethnic origin – be it Jewish or Gentile – but one’s morality: only the pure of heart would be saved.
While the Essenes may have been an influence on some of the earliest Christian communities, they did not influence all of them. Before the Church established what was and wasn’t acceptable in the Christian faith at the First Council of Nicaea in the early fourth century, Christianity was a mixed bag of beliefs and practices. When the Cathars claimed that they were descended from the first Christians, they probably had in mind the sort of simple Christianity practised by the Apostles, and were certainly implying that they were part of the chain of true Christianity that thrived before the Council of Nicaea, which not only defined what constituted orthodox Christianity, but also, in doing so, defined what was heresy, and many of the early Christian groups ended up in the latter camp. To understand how this came to be so, we need to consider the fractious political situation in both Israel and the nascent Church in the first century.
Immediately during and after Jesus’s ministry (which probably occurred between the mid twenties and mid thirties AD), his followers were a minority persecuted by both the Romans and the Pharisees alike. There is continuing controversy as to who was Jesus’s successor in the movement. Peter is traditionally seen as the Rock upon which the Church was built,18 and from whom the Roman Catholic Church claims descent, holding Peter as the first Pope. However, this is where problems set in. It has been argued19 that Jesus’s brother James, known as James the Greater, was the head of the first post-Crucifixion Christian community in Jerusalem, and it is thought that James’s followers clashed with Christianity’s most
fervent missionary, St Paul. This becomes all the more important when one recalls that Paul’s ideas played a large part – if not the largest – in forming the theology on which the Christian faith is based. And yet Paul remains a controversial figure: nowhere does he actually quote Jesus’s words, and his letters – which form the largest part of the New Testament – are frequently addressed to other Christian communities clarifying points of doctrine or urging them to toe the line. Had early Christianity been a unified whole, there would have been no need for such letters. It would not be going too far to say that ‘Paul, and not Jesus, was… the Founder of Christianity’,20 and therein lie the origins of Christian heresy: ‘Paul is, in effect, the first “Christian” heretic, and his teachings – which became the foundation of later Christianity – are a flagrant deviation from the “original” or “pure” form.’21 He is the ‘first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus’,22 as he never quotes from what Jesus himself actually taught. Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, Paul preached Christ Crucified; there is a big difference.
The Jewish Revolt of 66 AD effectively ended the Jerusalem church of James, while the Christianity of Paul, who was probably dead or dying in a cell in Rome at the time, would continue to grow. However, Pauline Christianity faced further challenges from the various unorthodox groups that sprang up in the three centuries before the Council of Nicaea sat. Certain of the groups developed the Dualism of the Essenes, and stressed the importance of gnosis, or direct experiential knowledge of the divine, and for that reason they are generally known as the Gnostics. Although there is a bewildering number of Gnostic schools of thought, each with their own, often complicated cosmologies, many of them did share the view that the world was created by an evil demiurge. Thus they are mitigated, or anti-cosmic, dualists. Perhaps the most important Gnostic school was that founded by Marcion in the mid-second century AD. Marcion proposed the existence of two gods: the true god, and the false god, the creator of the material world and the god of the Old Testament. Marcionites rejected the world and were rigorous ascetics. The emerging Roman Church recoiled in horror, and branded Marcion a heretic.
Aside from the idea of the two gods and the asceticism, another Gnostic idea would later reappear in Catharism, that of Christ as an apparition, not a flesh and blood human being. Many Gnostics saw Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection as essentially ghostly, without any human suffering involved. This idea became known as Docetism, and was pronounced heretical. However, Catharism was to differ from many Gnostic schools of thought in its stress upon the way to salvation being only through the ministrations of the Perfect – rather than by direct gnosis on the part of the Believer. In doing so, Catharism would ironically mirror Catholicism, which claimed that the only way to salvation was through the intervention of its priests.
The Council of Nicaea
The course of western civilisation changed forever on 28 October 312, when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (306–37) achieved a decisive victory over his brother-in-law Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome. The two men had been engaged in a power struggle since Constantine’s accession, and at Milvian Bridge, matters came to a head. The night before the battle, however, things did not look good for Constantine. His men were outnumbered by 4:1, and defeat seemed likely. As evening drew on, Constantine saw the Greek letters X P (‘Chi-Rho’, the first two letters of the word ‘Christ’) suddenly appear on the setting sun together with a cross and the motto In Hoc Signo Vinces – ‘in this sign you will conquer’. Constantine saw it as an omen, and ordered the cross be painted on his soldiers’ shields. When he won an outright victory the next day, Constantine put the success down to the god of the Christians, converted to the faith and issued the Edict of Milan, which ordered an end to religious persecution across the empire.23
As soon as Christianity began to flourish with its new-found status, there were problems. Arianism, in particular, was proving to be controversial, with its view that God the Father and Christ the Son were two distinct entities, with Christ being seen as inferior to God. To settle the matter, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, whose opening session began on 20 May 325. In the two months that the Council sat, the 300 or so Church fathers gathered at Nicaea debated a number of topics, including the fixing of the date of Easter, but by far the most important issue was Arianism. In an attempt to establish an orthodox position on Christ’s divine nature, the Nicene Creed was promulgated on 19 June, which drew the battle lines between the orthodox and everyone else. Belief in the tenets of the Creed were central to orthodoxy. They included belief in ‘God, the Father… maker of heaven and earth’, in Christ ‘the only Son of God… eternally begotten of the Father, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father’, who ‘was born of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfilment of the Scriptures.’ Christ’s flock was to be ministered unto solely by ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’24 The key issue of Christ’s divinity, and his being ‘one in Being with the Father’ was settled by vote. The Arians lost and were declared heretics. The Church was sending out a clear message: they were the only means by which one could achieve salvation.
Interestingly, one of the lesser matters that the Council of Nicaea dealt with – alongside what to do with zealots who had castrated themselves – was whether to welcome a strongly ascetic group back to the Church which had proclaimed strongly against Christians whose faith had lapsed, sometimes under torture. This group was known as the Cathars, or pure ones, from the Greek katharoi. Although this sect was not dualist and almost certainly had nothing to do with the mediaeval Cathars,25 it is tempting to see their fate as an ominous precursor of what was to come: the Nicaean Cathars were denounced and declared heretics, and the cult died out altogether in the fifth century.
Manichaeism and Other Dualist Heresies
Although the religious ferment in the early centuries of the common era produced a welter of groups whose positions in relation to orthodoxy were to be defined, whether they liked it or not, by the Council of Nicaea, one new religion emerged during this time which was subsequently to put the Church into veritable palpitations at its very mention: Manichaeism. Manichaeism was founded by the Persian prophet Mani (216–275), who was brought up in Babylon as an Elchasaite, a Jewish-Christian sect which was, interestingly, also known as katharoi. After a series of revelations, Mani attempted to reform the Elchasaites, but was denounced and thrown out. Undeterred, he began a vigorous missionary campaign with three former Elchasaites (one of whom was his father) to proselytise what Mani called the Religion of Light. Mani claimed that he was of the same tradition as Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus, but that these earlier masters had not revealed the whole truth, the revelation of which was his mission and his alone. Mani’s doctrine was formulated to appeal to as many people as possible; it was, in effect, a cut-and-paste religion – taking ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism – whose aim was to unite and save humanity in one overarching faith. There were two distinct classes of Manichaean, the Elect and the Listeners. The Elect were the faith’s priesthood, and practised strict asceticism, abstaining from meat, wine, blasphemy and sex. The Listeners – the rank and file believers of Mani’s church – were also expected to observe certain rules, including contributing to the upkeep of the elect, and, while they were allowed to own property and marry, they were forbidden to have children. While Mani’s system is too complicated to go into here at length, it should be noted that Manichaeism is radically dualist, denying the validity of baptism, holding that Christ did not suffer on the cross, rejecting the body as irredeemable and maintaining that the evil principle is the equal of the good.
To the church, Manichaeism was the deadliest of heresies, even worse than Marcionism. It enjoyed widespread popularity, and St Augustine of Hippo was a Listener of the sect for nine years. When the preaching of St Amb
rose and an epiphany in a garden in Milan turned Augustine towards Christianity in 386, he denounced Manichaeism in De Manichaeis and De Heresibus, which were to become the Church’s standard reference books on all matters heretical, and were frequently used in order to identify suspected heretics when the Great Heresy began to emerge in the west from the end of the tenth century onwards. To Augustine, his former faith was a perversion of the truth of the Gospels, its missionaries and priests deceitful and cunning.
With Augustine its most vocal and authoritative opponent, Manichaeism began to go into decline. As early as 372, Manichaeans were forbidden from congregating, and the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great (379–95) – who made Christianity the state religion in 380 – passed legislation against them. The fifth and sixth centuries saw a concerted effort by Rome to wipe out Mani’s followers, while similar measures were enacted in the Byzantine Empire. Early in his reign, the Byzantine emperor, Justinian the Great (527–65), introduced the death penalty for Manichaeans, the favoured method of despatching adherents of the Religion of Light being by burning. So effective was the persecution under Justinian that, by the time of his death in 565, Manichaeism had been effectively wiped out altogether in the west. The Church was tightening its grip.26