The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  To punish a sinner violently, to flog them, beat them, make them bleed—this was not to harm them but to help them, by saving them from worse punishments to come. Shenoute worried that if he didn’t beat the monks in his care then he was offending God. Punishments used against erring Christians even in Augustine’s time ranged from the confiscation of property to being barred from church, beatings and floggings with rods. It is better, said Augustine, “with severity to love, than with gentleness to deceive.”23 This was not cruelty. Did not the shepherd bring wandering sheep back to the flock with his rod?24 The Church, he wrote, “persecutes in the spirit of love.”25

  This was holy violence. Jesus may have told his followers that they should, when struck by an aggressor on their right cheek, offer him the other, but his fourth- and fifth-century followers were less forgiving. As John Chrysostom explained, if a Christian happens to hear someone blaspheme, then, far from turning their own cheek, they should “go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so. Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow.” Murder committed for the sake of God, argued one writer, was not a crime but actually “a prayer.”26

  Some of Chrysostom’s and Shenoute’s methods of control would be mirrored, a hundred or so years later, for very similar reasons, in imperial law. When the emperor Justinian came to power in AD 527, he set about reforming the morals of his subjects with a zeal and a legal thoroughness as yet unseen. He had a good incentive: if he did not punish them then, he firmly believed, God would punish him.

  Civil officials now found themselves required to enforce laws about what went on in private homes. Church officials found themselves pressed into service as de facto spies. Roman emperors had always used informers—“delatores.” Now, they were put to the service of the Church. Men of all ranks were required to become informers. Any breach of the laws was to be reported. Bishops were required to become the emperor’s spies and report back on their fellow officials. If they refused or failed in their duties, then they themselves would be held accountable. Among those whom the clergy were tasked with reporting on were actors, actresses and, as one revealing little law added, prostitutes “who wore monastic habits.”27 The punishments could be terrible. If a nurse aided and abetted an affair of a young woman in her charge, she would be punished by having molten lead poured down her throat. Correction was paramount. Justinian, as the chronicler Procopius put it, was determined to “close all the roads which lead to error.”28

  Some of the “holy” violence alarmed even the Church. In North Africa at the turn of the fifth century, the circumcellions became notorious not only for their suicides but for their vicious attacks on those who didn’t share their particular Christian beliefs. One bishop was standing next to his altar when suddenly he found himself surrounded and beaten by men with clubs. Then his attackers tore his altar apart, beat him with its remnants, before finally stabbing him in the groin. Another priest found himself dragged from his house and, once the circumcellions had him outside, they gouged out his eye. Like the tailor-made tortures that awaited sinners in hell, where blasphemers were strung up by their tongues, there was a ghoulish appositeness to these assaults. Eyes of the erring were gouged out because those who couldn’t see the true religion were “blind” anyway. Another bishop was seized, his hands chopped off and his tongue, which had preached falsehoods, cut out.29

  The circumcellions roamed widely, vandalizing property, setting light to churches and torching houses. Just when people thought that these “warriors,” as they called themselves, could not have gotten any worse, they invented what Augustine called a “new and unspeakable kind of violence, a piece of cruelty deserving of the Devil Himself.”30 By mixing together caustic lime powder and vinegar they created a solution strong enough to burn human skin. This they took to throwing into the eyes of priests, blinding them. Nowhere was safe: if a “traitor”—as they called those who didn’t share their beliefs—was known to be at home, the circumcellions would go into their house, drag them out and then attack them. The more unexpected the attack, the more glorious the effect.

  Festivals of the old gods were a favorite target: circumcellions raided these, smashing statues and shouting their rallying cry of “Laudes Deo”—“Praise the Lord”—as they went. In a moment, a joyful, drunken celebration could be reduced to sheer chaos. Like so many before and since, these men wanted religious conformity and they would stop at little to get it. Because Matthew 26:52 advised Christians to “sheathe your sword,” with almost Jesuitical precision they adopted the club as their weapon of choice. Appalling violence could thus be done while sin was avoided. Besides, a club was efficient enough: they would beat to death as many as they could before melting back into the landscape.31 The sticks with which these men carried out this work became their proud trademark; they called them their “Israels.”

  Augustine and others might have been shocked by such acts—but to an extent the Church was reaping what had been sown. A few decades earlier, as the academic Brent D. Shaw has pointed out, Christian preachers had been glad of the circumcellions’ violence and cultivated it: in the attacks against the temples such freelance destroyers had been eminently useful and were drafted in to do the strong-arm work of pulling these buildings down. Schooled and encouraged in violence and thuggery, the group suddenly became, to the dismay of those who had once encouraged them, much less biddable.32

  If circumcellions ignored the law, then they were in good company. At the highest level the Church was starting to challenge the power of the state. Roman observers had long noticed the Christian tendency to consider themselves above the law—and been irritated by it. When Pliny the Younger had put his slaves on trial he had executed them almost as much for their obstinacy as for their Christianity. Romans had frequently found the insolent conduct of Christians in court enraging. The Christian who had refused to answer any question in court—even the question of his name—with any words other than the phrase “I am a Christian”33 was admired by other Christians for his fortitude. To the Romans his behavior would have seemed stubborn to the point of infantile.

  As Christianity gained in power their acts of defiance gained in boldness. Courtrooms in the east of the empire were disrupted by sinister groups of dark-clad, psalm-chanting monks. Christians demanded the right to sanctuary in churches: the request became law.34 In Antioch, fear of the monks grew so great that one judge didn’t even wait for them to arrive in his court: hearing the sound of the monks approaching, chanting hymns, he simply jumped up from his seat, adjourned the court and fled from the city. “Justice cannot be exercised once they have appeared,” he said as he escaped.35

  In Caesarea, a judge dared to rule against a Christian bishop. He compounded his crime in the eyes of the Church by then declaring that everyone, whether they were Christian or not, should yield to the rule of law. He came to regret it. A mob of Christians, “like a hive roused by smoke,” surged around, “torch in hand, amid showers of stones, with cudgels ready, all ran and shouted together in their united zeal.” It was an effective technique. As one gloating Christian recorded: “What then was the conduct of this haughty and daring judge? He begged for mercy in a pitiable state of distress, cringing before them to an unparalleled extent.” This, the chronicler concluded with satisfaction, “was the doing of the God of Saints, Who works and changes all things for the best.”36

  It did not seem to be “for the best” to many non-Christians. Elite writers expressed their disgust at the disorder. As the philosopher Celsus had observed so many years before, one should not defile the laws because if everyone did so it would be impossible for the law to function at all. The sort of intimidation that zealous Christians indulged in was not, another writer protested, the way that crime and punishment should work in the Roman Empire. “Nobody draws his sword against the murderer and puts it to his throat, employing force in place of the forms of law,” said the orator Libanius. Instead, in a civi
lized society, “the place of swords is taken by impeachments and processes, civil and criminal.” The Christians, he wrote with disdain, seemed to have no time for that: “these people here were the only ones ever to judge the cases of those whom they accuse and, having passed judgement, themselves to play the hangman’s part.”37

  Christian preachers, however, were intransigent. They, they said, were answerable to a higher power than the mere law of the land. Their eye was upon heaven. As they reminded their flocks, it was not the law of some imperial bureaucrat that mattered. It was the law of God. Anything that saved a soul—even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that that soul inhabited—was an acceptable act. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those afflicted by the “pagan error” was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality. This was kindness, education, reformation.

  A rich tapestry of metaphor was brought out, cloaking what otherwise would have looked like naked aggression. Chrysostom wrote of hunting with nets to describe how one ought to herd the erring back to the true path. Augustine used the argument of the banquet described in Luke. Had not the lord of the house, when holding a feast, said to his servant: “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled”?38 Well then. Even the unwilling must be compelled to come into the house of the Lord. The arguments went further: those punishing errant Christians were not brutes; on the contrary, Augustine said that they were like a doctor tending to a sick patient. “When surgeons see that a gangrene must be cut away or cauterized, they often, out of compassion, turn a deaf ear to many cries.” In the same letter, Augustine likened the concerned Christian to someone who pulls a boy’s hair to stop him provoking serpents and a parent who removes a sword from a child’s hand. “Such punishments are administered by wise care, not by wanton cruelty.”39

  In a now-familiar paradox of punishment it was explained again and again that all these physical attacks were a kindness. The Church persecutes, Augustine said, in the spirit of love. Jerome, the biblical scholar and saint, concurred: it was not cruel to defend God’s honor—in the Bible sinners suffer punishments up to and including death.40 Chrysostom agreed: if he were to punish your earthly body, he reassured his listeners, it was only to protect your eternal one so that “you may be saved, and we may rejoice, and God may be glorified now and always, for ever and ever without end. Amen.”41 Those receiving such salvation might, not unreasonably, have felt otherwise. One monk in Shenoute’s care was saved with beatings so savage that he died of his injuries.

  And what if people, disinclined to rejoice, became frightened by the fact that their neighbors were spying on them, reporting on them, hounding them in their homes? Well, fear too had its benefits. Better to be scared than to sin. “Where there is terror,” said Augustine, “there is salvation . . . Oh, merciful savagery!”42

  The intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.43

  Chapter Sixteen

  * * *

  “A Time of Tyranny and Crisis”

  Moreover, we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism.

  —Justinian Code, 1.11.10.2

  THE PHILOSOPHER DAMASCIUS was a brave man: you had to be to see what he had seen and still be a philosopher. But as he walked through the streets of Athens in AD 529 and heard the new laws bellowed out in the town’s crowded squares, even he must have felt the stirrings of unease.1 He was a man who had known persecution at the hands of the Christians before. He would have been a fool not to recognize the signs that it was beginning again.

  As a young man, Damascius had studied philosophy in Alexandria, the city of the murdered Hypatia.2 He had not been there for long when the city had turned, once again, on its philosophers. The persecution had begun dramatically. A violent attack on a Christian by some non-Christian students had started a chain of reprisals in which philosophers and pagans were targeted. Christian monks, armed with an axe, had raided, searched, then demolished a house accused of being a shrine to “demonic” idols.3 The violence had spread and Christians had found and collected all images of the old gods from across Alexandria, from the bathhouses and from people’s homes. They had placed them on a pyre in the center of the city and burned them. As the Christian chronicler Zachariah of Mytilene comfortably observed, Christ had declared that he had “given you the authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all enemy power.”4

  For Damascius and his fellow philosophers, however, all that had been a mere prelude to what came next. Soon afterwards, an imperial officer had been sent to Alexandria to investigate paganism. The investigation had rapidly turned to persecution. This was when philosophers had been tortured by being hung up by cords and when Damascius’s own brother had been beaten with cudgels—and, to Damascius’s great pride, had remained silent.5

  Philosophers weren’t only attacked in Alexandria—and they didn’t always bear the attacks with such mute suffering. When one philosopher was being beaten in a courtroom in Constantinople, the blood started flowing down his back. The man allowed some of it to pool in his hand. You savage, he said to the judge. “You want to devour the flesh of men? Then have something to wash it down with.” He threw a palmful of blood over the official: “Drink this wine!”6

  Damascius would come out of the Alexandrian persecutions a changed man. He had never originally intended to study philosophy at all; the privileged son of wealthy parents from Damascus, he had hoped to pursue the more glamorous life of a public orator. Mere chance had brought him into the philosophical fold, but once he had converted to the cause he not only devoted his life to philosophy, he also risked his life for it, repeatedly. He would develop a deep contempt for anyone who did anything less, and in his writings poured scorn on those who were adept at talking about what should be done but inept at actually doing anything.7 Words without deeds were useless. Action, then. When the persecutions in Alexandria became intolerable, Damascius decided to flee. In secret, he hurried with his teacher, Isidore, to the harbor and boarded a boat. Their final destination was Greece, and Athens, the most famous city in the history of Western philosophy.

  It was now almost four decades since Damascius had escaped to Athens as an intellectual exile. In that time, a lot had changed. When he had arrived in the city he had been a young man; now he was almost seventy. But he was still as energetic as ever, and as he walked about Athens in his distinctive philosopher’s cloak—the same austere cloak that Hypatia had worn—many of the citizens would have recognized him. For this émigré was now not only an established fixture of Athenian philosophy and a prolific author, but also the successful head of one of the city’s philosophical schools: the Academy. To say “one of” is to diminish this institution’s importance: it was perhaps the most famous school in Athens, indeed in the entire Roman Empire. It traced its history back almost a thousand years and it would leave its linguistic traces on Europe and America for two thousand years to come. Every modern academy, académie and akademie owes its name to it.8

  Since he had crossed the wine-dark sea, life had gone well for Damascius—astonishingly well, given the turbulence he had left behind. In Alexandria, Christian torture, murder and destruction had had its effect on the intellectual life of the city. After Hypatia’s murder the numbers of philosophers in Alexandria and the quality of what was being taught there had, unsurprisingly, declined rapidly. In the writings of Alexandrian authors there is a clear mood of depression, verging on despair. Many, like Damascius, had left.

  In fifth-century Athens, the Church was far less powerful and considerably less aggressive. Its intellectuals had felt pressure nonetheless. Pagan philosophers who flagrantly opposed Christianity paid for their dissent. The city was rife with informers and city officials listened to them. One of Damascius’s predecessors had exasperated the authorities so much that he had fled, escaping—narrowly—with his life and his property. Another philoso
pher so vexed the city’s Christians by his unrepentant “pagan” ways that he had had to go into exile for a year to get away from the “vulture-like men” who now watched over Athens. In an act that could hardly have been more symbolic of their intellectual intentions, the Christians had built a basilica in the middle of what had once been a library. The Athens that had been so quarrelsome, so gloriously and unrepentantly argumentative, was being silenced. This was an increasingly tense, strained world. It was, as another author and friend of Damascius put it, “a time of tyranny and crisis.”9

  The very fabric of the city had changed. Its pagan festivals had been stopped, its temples closed and, as in Alexandria, the skyline of the city had been desecrated—here, by the removal of Phidias’s great figure of Athena. Even Athens’s fine philosophical traditions had been debased—though as much by incompetent philosophers as by anything the Christians did. When Damascius and his teacher arrived in the city at the end of the fifth century, they had been utterly underwhelmed by it. “Nowadays,” Isidore observed, “philosophy stands not on a razor’s edge but truly on the brink of extreme old age.”10 Damascius had “never heard of philosophy being so despised in Athens” as it was then.11 It is a mark of quite how uncongenial the empire had become to non-Christians that despite this, Athens had seemed the most congenial place for them to flee to.

  Yet Damascius had turned Athenian philosophy around. In the decades since his arrival in the city, he had taken its philosophical schools from decrepitude to international success. Once again, the Academy was attracting what one ancient writer called the “quintessential flower of the philosophers of our age” to come there to study.12 Its philosophers were hugely prolific—and knowledgeable: Damascius and his fellow scholars were producing works that have been called the most learned documents ever to have been produced by the ancient world.13 As well as all of this, the inexhaustible Damascius would also find time to deliver densely academic lectures on Aristotle and Plato and produce a series of subtle works on metaphysical philosophy, Plato and mathematics.14