Constantine
Constantine was the son of a junior emperor of the West in Diocletioan’s tetrarachy. After his father’s death in 306 CE, and having been proclaimed “Augustus” by his father’s troops, Contantius Chlorus marched to the Gates of Rome in the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 CE. He won the fight against his rival Maxentius, who had proclaimed toleration for Christians. Constantine was to go him one better; he proclaimed himself a Christian, but delayed baptism until his deathbed in 337 CE, in order to behave as he chose but still receive absolution and the “guarantee” of heaven at the very end.
His personal proclamation as a Christian performed miracles for the Christians of Rome. Constantine gave gifts to the Christians of money, property, and privileges for the clergy, both in Rome and elsewhere. He ordered new basilicas built in Rome on the reported sites of the deaths of Peter and Paul, which brought prestige to the church it had never known before.48
Constantine was the proverbial “double-edged sword” for Christendom both East and West. When he became Roman Emperor in the West in 312 CE, he found in favor of the Donatists in North Africa; when he became Emperor in both the East and West in 324 CE, he founded his capital New Rome as the city of Constantinople in Anatolia/Turkey. A momentous forgery then arose, teaching that Constantine left all authority in the West to the bishop of Rome, which was not true.
Constantine saw himself as overseer of the entire Christian church. To this end he gathered large numbers of bishops in the Councils of Arles in 314 and Nicea in 325, which was to result in the Nicean Creed. After the church council had made its decisions, the government of Constantine backed them in terms of civil law, preventing both dissent and dissenters.
During his short reign of 25 years from 312 to 337 CE, Constantine murdered his eldest son, his father-in-law, and brother-in-law. His first wife Minervina, a priestess of the moon Goddess Minera, mysteriously disappeared. His second wife Fauta was his stepping stone to the throne, according to the ancient matriarchal rule of hieros gamos, meaning that the throne still passed through the female lineage even then. On his deathbed, awaiting Christian baptism, Constantine still contemplated murder: He had gathered together many children to be killed in order that he might be bathed in their blood as a healing charm for his terminal illness.
Constantine was baptized on his deathbed by Bishop Eusebius who aspired unsuccessfully to be Pope and died in 371 CE, but not before he adopted the principle of “holy lying” on behalf of the church, through letters he forged regarding Christian martyrdom occurring years before his own life. Afterward, Church of Rome cited this same Eusebius to prove that “any lie is permissible if it glorifies the Christian faith.”49
Here is yet another sordid piece in the strange puzzle that will finally create the European Inquisition.
Three early Christian writers’ work influenced the policies of the Church of Rome and need to be taken into account before the fall of the Roman Empire, which is about to take place, in 401 CE.
Ambrose of Milan had a solid classical background and was the son of a high-ranking family. Milan at the time was a large, important center and the residence of the Western emperor. It became the metropolitan see of Northern Italy, influencing Western Gaul (France) and the Balkans. Ambrose made it his mission to root out the last vestiges of a movement he considered heretical called Western Arianism. During Ambrose’s life, supporters of the Spanish religious leader Priscillian, appealed to the Western emperor Magnus Maximus after finding no solace in Ambrose. The Emperor sentenced these Christian dissidents to execution, thereby being the first civil official to condemn people to death for heresy.
And now, most of the parts of the puzzle are in place.
Jerome is represented not as a theologian but the premier scripture scholar of Christian antiquity, and as such he is a scholar-monk. He was also an arch misogynist, who wrote about women as “the gate of the devil, the patron of wickedness, the sting of the serpent.” As was true of Augustine, Jerome led a dissolute student life but was baptized in Rome after which he sought the life of a monk in locations both East and West. But he had a proclivity for becoming involved in controversy, which resulted in his seeking seclusion (probably being banished) in a monastery in Bethlehem for the rest of his life.
The most influential writer was Augustine of Hippo, North Africa. He was born near the border of present-day Tunis in 354 CE, but he died in 430 CE in Hippo as the Vandals were besieging the city. Augustine’s father came from polytheism, and his mother was a convert to Christianity. As a youth, he was uninterested in Christianity because of “crudity in style and control of its scriptures. Its cautions of behavior were also uncongenial to him, and as a very young man he was already established in Carthage with a mistress and a professional chair of rhetoric.”50
From Carthage, Augustine journeyed to Milan for another appointment in rhetoric. He favored Manechaeism, a Gnostic sect founded in third century Persia, but converted at the age of 32 to Catholic Christianity, and was baptized in Milan on Easter 387 CE. Before his conversion, Augustine had concubines (women with whom he had sex without being married to them), an unsatisfactory relationship with his domineering mother and a very free lifestyle. His rise to power after baptism was meteoric. Three years later he was ordained priest and four years after that, in 395 at the age of 40, he became bishop of Hippo. After he became bishop, he found himself deeply embroiled in the Donatist controversy, representing the North Africans in Rome and at the end of his life deeply in conflict with the current Roman Pope. Thomas Cahill author of How the Irish Saved Civilization writes, “Augustine assumes that original sin is passed along in the very fluids of procreation and that sexual intercourse, because it involves a loss of rational control, is always at least eventually sinful, and should be indulged in as little as possible.”51 And because Augustine is the most quoted early church father by the time of the Inquisition, the following from author Cahill is noteworthy:
He (Augustine) subsequently writes the first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error: error has no rights; to disbelieve in forced conversion is to deny the power of God: and God must whip the son he receives “per molestias erudite” – true education begins with physical abuse. This from a man who condemned the punishments and cruel threats of his childhood classroom. Augustine, the last great man of Roman antiquity, is going over the edge. The doctrine he has enunciated will echo down the ages in the cruelest infamies, executed with highest justification. Augustine, of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition.52
Indeed, it is the writing of Augustine in his City of God and other works that form the very backbone of the Inquisition. Cahill concludes, “Augustine has become in his old age the type of evil cleric, full of mercy for those who fear him, full of seething contempt for those who dare oppose him, scheming to make common cause with whatever state-sponsored cruelty will, in the name of order, suppress his opposition.”53
The Dark Ages
Alaric, king of the Visigoths, sacked Rome in 401, and the gates of hell broke loose in the crumbling Empire. The Goths were Teutonic people who in the third to the fifth centuries invaded and settled in parts of the Roman Empire. Visigoths were Western members of the Goths who maintained a monarchy in Southern Gaul (France) until 507 CE and in Spain until 711 CE. When Alaric left with all the gold, silver, portable goods of value, and all the Visigoths the Romans had captured and forced into slavery, leaving citizens of Rome with only their lives, a new era began in the West. It was to be called the “Dark Ages.” The stability of power wielded by the Roman Emperor, termed Pax Romana, collapsed, leaving the Christian Church of Rome to do battle with the other powerful city churches on their own.
One of the more disgraceful examples of this power struggle was so vicious that it created a famous chapter in history. It revolved around Cyril who was bishop of Alexandria, but the central figure was a woman of learning and talent named Hypatica. She was the daughter of the philosopher Theon, whose f
ame she far surpassed. Her writings include The Astronomical Canon and a commentary on Apollonius. We know her existence was important enough to be included in the Suda, a tenth century Byzantine encyclopedia which describes her in detail. She taught publicly and spoke freely on neo-Platonism, astrology and science. Her students, young men, were among the brightest and wealthiest, traveling great distances to study with Hypatia. She held a position of both cultural and political influence in Alexandria. There is no doubt that she was jealously regarded by others who fared less prominently. But that was not the sole cause of her demise. Hypatia was caught in a battle for power between secular authority and the Christian bishop of Alexandria. The Suda says, “The whole city rightly loved her and worshipped her in a remarkable way but the rulers of the city from the first envied her.”54
A new civil governor of Egypt, Orestes, came to hear her lectures and honor her, and rumor was spread that Hypatia had “beguiled” him with her magic, causing him to cease attending church and welcoming her followers who were now Christian. Bishop Cyril and Governor Oresles then became embroiled in a civil disorder during which the followers of one killed the others. After a conflict between Christians and Jews at the theater, Cyril led a Christian uprising against the synagogues, ordering the Jews be expelled from Alexandria and their possessions confiscated.
Orestes prevented this from occurring, raising the wrath of the fiery tempered Bishop. The relationship between Hypatia and Orestes was blamed for the irreconcilable differences between Orestes and Cyril. The Bishop inflamed the Christian populace with his rhetoric against her. A zealot named Peter led the mob who intercepted Hypatia returning home, pulled her from her carriage and took her to a church named Caesarum. There they took her clothes and when she was naked, the now 60 year old woman was sliced to death by attackers using sharp pieces of broken tiles. After she was dead, these mad zealots dismembered her body, taking the pieces to Cinaron where they burned her. According to the account by Socrates Scholatious, this happened “in the month of March, during lent in the fourth year of Cyril’s (bishop) episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius (pope) and the sixth of Theodorus (emperor), or 415 CE.”
From the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE to the end of the first millennium, 1000 CE, the Western world was battered into a dark and ugly mire of spiritual despair and physical destruction. Once the Empire ceased, roads were no longer maintained, aqueducts were left untended, commerce diminished. Invaders destroyed walls, fortresses, towns, but after plunder and rape, they left. The Roman Christian Church stepped into the void vacated by secular authority. Whereas the Romans were generally tolerant of many religious beliefs and practices, “as early as 382 CE this church officially declared that any opposition to its own creed in favor of others must be punished by the death penalty.”55 In Carthage the temple of the Mother of Heaven was converted into a Christian church, but when in 440 CE the bishops discovered people had returned to worshipping the ancient Goddess, the entire structure was leveled. A general ban on all forms of learning, other than those given by the church directly, was also put into force.
By the end of the fifth century, Christian rulers abolished the study of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, geography, and astronomy. Pope Gregory the Great denounced all secular education as folly and wickedness and forbade laymen to read the Bible. He ordered the burning of the Palatine Apollo library so as not to distract the faithful by way of secular literature. At Ephesus, the temple of Artemis was destroyed and when leveled, monks and hermits were sent to live in the ruins to defile the sacred premises and prevent reconstruction. In the late fourth century, Rome had 424 temples, 304 shrines, 80 statues of deities in gold or silver, 64 statues in ivory, 3,200 statues in bronze, and many thousands in marble. One hundred years later, most were gone. It is recorded that a hierophant priest of the Eleusian mysteries while witnessing this destruction wrote that the Empire “was being overwhelmed by a fabulous and formless darkness mastering the loveliness of the world.” As John Chrysotom boasted, “Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.”56 Obviously, many fled from both the destruction and the persecution. Scholars turned eastward to Persia (Iran) where a Sassanid king made possible a school of medicine and science to accommodate them, and as a result, Persia became the world’s intellectual capital for 200 hundred years. By the time Justinian closed the Athenian schools in 529, Western learning had been almost entirely dispersed to Persia, to Southeast India and to the far north Celtic Ireland.
“Ignorance was helpful to the spread of the faith; so ignorance was fostered. The study of medicine was forbidden, on the ground that all diseases were caused by demons and could be cured only by (catholic) exorcism. Monks at the time of Pope Alexander III were still forbidden to study any techniques of healing other than verbal charms, prayer.”57 Educated citizens were persecuted; their books deemed witchcraft texts by those who could not read them. Priestesses were persecuted because they had education, medical skills, wealth and property, and a prior claim to allegiance with the divine.
The Black Death
The constant invasions into Europe by Asian Huns (370 CE), Northern Vandals (406), Goths (410), spread a fearsome disease, known as the Black Death, which was a plague born by bacilli living in the blood of fleas. It caused dark patches on the skin, a black tongue, carbuncles in the lymph nodes and hemorrhages. Black blisters (probably smallpox) often accompanied the manifestation of this dreadful plague. Most victims died within three days. By 500 CE, both smallpox and plague were causing massive death tolls, even though some people did survive.58
The specter of the wholesale dead and dying of continental Europe probably succeeded in convincing the Huns and others to retreat before they, too, died of plague.
Any remaining towns disintegrated as the survivors fled to countryside or mountains where air, water, and living conditions were safer. At the end of this plague, eighty percent of Europe was populated by rural peasants and precariously ruled by scattered feudal warlords.
Nearly the entire population was unable to read or write. There were no books, no manuals, no schools, little commerce outside local markets, no money, scarcely any travel except by river boat because roads were either non-existent or dangerous. Everyday life for the peasants, therefore, became a matter of self-sufficiency on a minimal subsistence level. Family ties and rural roots reverted to communal systems once again because civil authority had disintegrated. Any power was local power, centered on the ten-mile radius a man or horse could walk and return in a day.
What does this mean for Western women? During plague they continued in age-old practices: giving birth, midwifing at births, preparing the dead for burial and bringing nurturance to the barely living.
Ackterberg says,
Women, whether noble born or poor, faced conditions likely to breed poor health. The atmosphere of feudal castles and the peasant dwellings was rank, with no sanitation to speak of. In the increasing of Christian doctrine, a constant war was waged against the flesh. Thus people exalted in not attending to their physical needs-especially cleanliness. They were covered with foul eruptions, exacerbated by rough woolen clothings and the constant presence of dirt, ticks, fleas. Poor nutrition, filth, crowded living conditions, and hard labor took their usual toll, leaving the population vulnerable to disease, and suffering from perpetual fatigue and mental dullness.59
Most married women, reasonably fertile, could expect to be pregnant, giving birth to from 6 to 12 children, half of whom would die before reaching maturity. Selective infanticide, “exposure” or neglect of female babies was practiced. “Manorial and parish regards show disproportionate high rates of male births during times of pestilence and famine. The poorer the family or conditions, the higher number of males.”60 Was this a natural phenomena or the result of selective female infanticide? Probably both were present in varying degrees at different time.
As for medical care during these times,
regardless of social class, women healers were primarily involved in tending 1) pregnant women, 2) dying people, 3) and children. “Most people had access to wise women,” Ackerberg says, and they functioned as herbalists and empiricists, sustaining the healing lore through oral tradition and apprenticeship.61
In light of the Church of Rome prohibiting both the study of medicine and its practice during these centuries, the assistance sought from local village wise-women attained even greater significance. There was no one else to help when in-home, domestic cures failed, particularly for the majority rural population. And, because the wise women’s help was often sought in secret at the end of a long process-seeking cure, they saw the most desperately ill and diseased people. No doubt they were the avenue of last resort with their doors being knocked upon in the dead of night.
These women no longer had access to the written works of the great women doctors and healers of five hundred years before. What they knew is considered folk healing or folk medicine. These are the herbal and common sense remedies passed along for many generations between kindred women. All geographic areas had the services of the most ancient and noble profession: midwives. Midwifery was crucial to the perpetuation of humanity. As such, the midwife herself has traversed a perilous course from exonerated to reviled, persecuted, and finally emancipated. During this period of the Dark Ages, midwives performed heroically under adverse conditions. Medical care relied on ancient domestic knowledge of plants and the remedy known from Neolithic times: a mixture of wine and poppy juice. This pain killer has made its way through all of Western human development from the very dawn of the healing arts. However, Dr. Achterberg laments, “The practices associated with Hygeia such as sanitation and prevention were largely forgotten. Even medical tools buried by the volcano at Pompeii were not reinvented for another six hundred years.”62
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