His being an Arian, however, made that extremely difficult.
Newton’s first paradoxical question, which seems very far away from the Council of Nicaea but actually stems directly from it, is “Whether the ignominious death of Arius in a boghouse was not a story feigned & put about by Athanasius above twenty years after his death.”
The foul odors of Nicaea were as nothing compared to the stench of Constantinople, that city, formerly Byzantium, that Constantine had made the new capital of the empire in AD 329. That stench was never more apparent than in the flagstone square fronting the Forum of Constantine. Here horses were paraded all day long, leaving reeking piles of dung that armies of slaves scurried to sweep up but never quite disposed. There rose up in the center of the square a 120-foot-high reddish porphyry marble column. This column was surmounted by a bronze statue, seven rays emanating from its head, that had originally resembled Apollo but had been reworked to resemble Constantine. The column was hollow and packed with pieces of “the one true Cross” that the dowager empress Helena, Constantine’s mother (and once a tavern girl in Bythnia), had sent back from Jerusalem. These most precious relics of the Passion of Christ must (if they really were inside the porphyry column) have lent the proverbial odor of sanctity to the forum square, even if they did nothing to relieve the stench.
On one side of the public square there stood a public latrine that bordered on being a public menace. With regard to ancient latrines, a modern-day scholar of ancient Roman plumbing tells us that foul-smelling mephitic gases, expanding through the sewers, could explode at any moment and send sheets of flames sweeping up through the toilet seats. Sharp-toothed scampering rats poked their heads up everywhere.*11 If you had any open wounds you ran the risk of contracting diarrhea, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, or worse from a previous occupant of the seat.26
History informs us that in the summer of 339 a terrible accident took place in this public latrine that stood on one side of Constantinople’s forum square. Many historians report that early that summer Constantine the Great summoned Arius to a private audience at his royal palace in Constantinople. Standing uneasily before the emperor, trying not to notice the pagan pomp and splendor of the palace, Arius thought he knew what this was all about, and he had come prepared: concealed beneath his robe was a copy of his creation, the Arian manifesto.
Constantine told the notorious heretic that if he swore an oath that he had renounced his heresy, then he, the emperor, would guarantee his reception back into the orthodox church and even allow him to celebrate Mass at the church of Constantinople the next morning. Arius swore this oath; and a rumor has sullied his memory down through history that at the same moment that he swore he clutched beneath his robe his Arian manifesto denying the oneness of God and Christ.
Next, writes Newton, “the emperor dismissed him with these words: ‘If thy faith be right thou hast well sworn, but if impious and yet thou hast sworn, God will condemn thee for thy oath’” (emphasis in original).27
An emissary raced to the church of Constantinople to tell Bishop Alexander (not to be confused with Bishop Alexander of Alexandria) about the unexpected visitor who would be arriving to take communion the next morning. Shortly afterward, anyone entering this cathedral would have been startled to see a bundle of bright crimson robes lying, as if flung there, at the foot of the altar. Quick jerks would have revealed the outline of agitated legs: the bundle of robes would have Alexander, in tears, prostrate on the marble floor, arms outstretched in supplication, beseeching God to “take Arius away” lest this man who was polluted with heresy might, if he were received into the church of Constantinople, pollute the church as well.
The next morning, crossing the forum square with his assistants, on the way to communion at the church, Arius must have been in a celebratory mood. He would have skirted the snorting horses and the piles of manure with more than his usual alacrity. Perhaps he pointed out to his retinue the statue of Constantine on the porphyry column and thanked God for the emperor’s beneficence.
Passing by the multi-seat public latrine, Arius was seized by the need to relieve himself and disappeared into the boghouse (outhouse).
Did the pieces of the one true Cross in the porphyry column rising up from the center of the square transmit evil rays to Arius that morning? After all, he was a heretic, and he was about to invade a bastion of orthodoxy! Certainly the latrine didn’t lack for means for a vengeful God to punish a blasphemous servant: gas explosions; a poisonous rat bite; a contracted, lingering, fatal disease—any one of these would do the trick. Arius’s assistants waited for him outside the latrine. Time passed. Arius did not reappear. They rushed in. The great heretic lay dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood and excrement; his bowels had burst open. In the words of Isaac Newton, Arius, entering the latrine, “falling headlong burst in sunder & died upon the ground, being deprived both of communion & life.”28
Edward Gibbon writes, “On the same day which had been fixed for the triumph of Arius, he expired; and the strange and horrid circumstances of his death might excite a suspicion that the orthodox saints had contributed more efficaciously than by their prayers to deliver the church from the more formidable of their enemies.” Gibbon continues:
We derive the original story from Athanasius, who expresses some reluctance to stigmatize the memory of the dead. He might exaggerate; but the perpetual commerce of Alexandria and Constantinople would have rendered it dangerous to invent. Those who press the literal narrative of the death of Arius (his bowels suddenly burst open in a privy) must make their choice between poison and a miracle.29
We realize to what extent we are, with this event, in the tragicomic world of the surreal, the absurd and the macabre, when MacCulloch tells us that “the orthodox tradition of public worship contains hymns of hate directed toward named individuals who are defined as heretical” and that such a hymn of hate was written about Arius—a hymn in which “in celebration of the First Council of Nicaea, the liturgy describes with relish (and a malevolent theological pun) the wretched end of of Nicaea’s arch-villain in fatal diarrhea on the privy.”
Arius fell into the precipice of sin,
Having shut his eyes so as not to see the light,
And he was ripped asunder
by a divine hook so that along with his entrails
he forcibly emptied out
all his essence [ousia!] and his soul,
and was named another Judas
both for his ideas and the manner of his death.30
Did the archbishop Alexander or the emperor Constantine take matters into their own hands and have Arius murdered? Was Athanasius the culprit?
Sir Isaac Newton thought none of the above. He didn’t believe Arius had been murdered at all, not on his way to communion nor at any other time. Newton believed Arius had lived for ten more years at least.
Newton is indicting Athanasius for bearing false witness against Arius—in modern parlance, he is blaming him for character assassination. We’ll recall that the first of the paradoxical questions asks, “Whether the ignominious death of Arius in a boghouse was not a story feigned & put about by Athanasius above twenty years after his death.” Newton was convinced the answer was yes. He is accusing Athanasius of fabricating the whole thing many years later, when anyone who might have been connected with such an event would be dead or couldn’t be expected to remember what had happened or not happened. Athanasius had invented the story to prove that God preferred orthodoxy to Arianism. He had done this in about 361, while he was in exile in the Egyptian desert.
Newton asks us to reflect on Athanasius’s situation during this Egyptian exile. To do this, we need to briefly fill in his life from 328 onward.
From his ascension to the episcopate of Alexandria in 328, up to his exile in Egypt, Athanasius’s behavior was characterized by total defiance of the emperor, violent denunciation of Athanasius’s foes, and fiery preaching of the doctrine of the Trinity. The bishop of Alexandria was either despis
ed or adored, and outside of Egypt he was mostly despised. Imperious, intransigent, self-righteous, and abrasive to the point of inflicting physical pain, he pushed his doctrinal enemies to the limit, virtually forcing them to accuse him of vile crimes (whether or not they had taken place, and Newton certainly thought they had), including murder (of someone other than Arius). Constantine had died in 327. His three sons took power. The youngest, Constantius, emerged as sole ruler of the empire. Constantius was an avowed Arian, and Athanasius found himself in more hot water than ever.
In council after council, the champion of orthodoxy was never quite able to shake off the charges his enemies had made against him. He was exiled to France for two years and Rome for three years, and he had to cool his heels in the Egyptian desert for three extended periods. Through all of this he never stopped writing, never putting down his pen even during (as we’ll see in chapter 5) a bloody battle with Roman soldiers in his own church. As a result of that battle he fled Alexandria, disappearing into the desert and not reemerging for six years.
This final exile cast Athanasius into despair. But his situation wasn’t without its perks. Five thousand mostly Egyptian monks, all of whom revered him, vied with each other to serve the dethroned archbishop as bodyguards or secretaries or messengers or cooks—as hosts providing him with every creature comfort. His sojourn wasn’t without a touch of what passed for romance in the land of the monks: he was regularly hidden in the house of a twenty-year-old virgin, celebrated for her beauty, who concealed him in “her most secret chamber.” Edward Gibbon writes, “As long as the danger continued, she regularly supplied him with books and provisions, washed his feet, managed his correspondence, and dexterously concealed from the eye of suspicion this familiar and solitary intercourse between a saint whose character required the most unblemished chastity and a female whose charms might excite the most dangerous emotions.”31
Still, all this was hardly enough to console the exiled archbishop, who wondered with increasing desperation how he could stem the tide of Arianism he saw rising all around him. Newton asks us to imagine Anthanasius (and the following words probably convey how Newton really felt) turning this way and that like a cornered rat. What could he do against the heretics? he asked himself despairingly. He had always fought back ruthlessly; there had to be a way to fight back now, from here, from this desert where he was. After all, the survival of the doctrine of the Trinity was in his hands. And, where that was the issue, there couldn’t be any such thing as an immoral act.
That is how, says Newton, Athanasius decided to rewrite history (though it’s unlikely the exiled archbishop explained it to himself in these words). He engaged in an orgy of letter writing. His gorgeous virgin assistant must never have known how many lies she helped him draft. The letters went out to orthodox monks and bishops near and far. In a separate epistle, Athanasius shared his bogus information with his friend the historian Serapion. In these letters, Athanasius told the world, for the first time, the “true” story of the death of Arius. And that is the story that is told above.
Athanasius explained to one and all that he had heard the story from his assistant Macarius, who was inside the cathedral in Constantinople when Archbishop Alexander threw himself down on the floor and begged God to “take Arius away” if he was indeed a heretic. Athanasius explained to his friends that it has taken him this long to tell the story because he hadn’t wanted to make religious-political capital out of the lamentable death of that poor man, Arius—for, after all, we are all appointed to die, are we not?
But now that he had told the story Athanasius felt it was his duty to point out that Arius’s death was obviously the answer to Alexander’s prayers (and Constantine’s warning). Could anyone, knowing the manner of Arius’s death, ever doubt that he was struck down by the Lord because his wrong understanding of Christianity was not to be tolerated any longer?
The dethroned archbishop was sorry to say that the recipients of this letter couldn’t check out the details with Macarius, who had told Athanasius the story in the first place, because Macarius was no longer among the living. Moreover, seeing as the contents of this letter were of a delicate nature, Athanasius begged the reader not to show it to anyone else—and, once having read it, to destroy it or return it to Athanasius.
Newton tells us that the contents of this letter, which would later make up a part of Athanasius’s autobiography, were taken up some sixty to ninety years later by several Greek historians who incorporated them into the accepted record of the times.
This letter, as important as were its particular contents, was only one of many scurrilous rewrites of history that Athanasius sent out during this trying period. (He had sent a good many out before then.) In “Paradoxical Questions,” Newton examines all these documents at great length. But, before we can discuss the many other suspicious events for which, according to Newton, Athanasius would be forced to supply alternative accounts, we have to put flesh on the bones of our account of Athanasius’s life from 328 until his exile in Egypt. And to do that we’ll have to reach much further back than 328—even further back than Athanasius’s student days in Alexandria—to the emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SEVERED HAND
Murder in the Fourth Century AD, Part 2
We now begin our account of the second half of Isaac Newton’s furious assault on the integrity of Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria. And we find again, as we found in the previous chapter, proud prelates striving to be Christlike—and to assert their wills—in an only-recently pagan world where Christianity, still in a molten state, struggles within itself to find a new expression. There stems from this disjointed universe, as we saw in chapter 4, seemingly surrealistic scenes and alternate clashing versions of reality. Our dramatis personae expands to include (along with a prostitute and several mobs) two new protagonists: Eusebius, the commanding and dressy archbishop of Nicodemia, and the emperor Constantius, Constantine’s son and heir and a bumbling but honest Arian whom Newton admiringly promotes to the head of the class. As for Isaac Newton, he is still the ace detective, still pursuing to the bitter end and exposing the deceptions of Athanasius as he seeks to impose idolatry and apostasy upon the world.
And there is more murder and mayhem, principally in the form of a severed hand.
In the previous chapter we left Athanasius busily rewriting history with the protection of legions of desert monks and the special help of a beautiful young assistant. We begin this new chapter by making a brief leap backward in time, to a searing sequence of events that Athanasius had witnessed as a boy that had made a tremendous impact on him. They also profoundly affected the church, for they were the cause of the first real schism in Christianity.
In February 303, the emperor Diocletian unleashed a final bloody persecution on the Christians. For nine years, rack, scourge, iron hooks, and red-hot beds were the frequent companion of the followers of Jesus who refused to renounce their faith and sacrifice to the pagan gods of Rome.
Newton remarks with uncharacteristic inexactitude that Diocletian’s soldiers slaughtered 144,000 Christians in Egypt alone, exclaiming indignantly, “What think you then was done throughout the whole Roman world?”1 Edward Gibbon put the number of homicides at closer to 2,000, adding that thousands more were permanently maimed, and cautioning that “the biases of the ancient historians, their fierce allegiances, their isolation, difficulties in communications and in finding reliable witnesses, makes it almost impossible to know exactly what happened.”2
Nine years after Diocletian launched his pogrom, in the summer of 311, Archbishop Peter of Alexandria—then a prisoner of the Romans in a communal jail cell in Alexandria—decisively drew a curtain*12 across the center of the cell and addressed a disheveled and starving group of clerics sitting around him: “Let those who are of my opinion come to me! Let those who are of Meletius join Meletius.”3
The opinion in question was whether Christians who renou
nced their faith rather than be tortured or killed by the Romans should be allowed to rejoin the church once the persecution was over. Melitius, who sat at the other end of the cell, was Peter’s second-in-command, a bishop who did what the archbishop didn’t have time to do in the archbishopric of Alexandria (and, for that matter, all of Egypt, of which Peter had the charge) and kept him aware of all the rest. Between the two prelates huddled a crowd of Egyptian deacons and bishops, rounded up by the Romans during the summer and awaiting martyrdom by execution or extradition to the salt mines of Palestine.
Meletius believed the lapsed Christians should be allowed back into the church only after a period of soul-searching and repentance, if at all. Peter (“a kindly man, and like a father to all,” writes the historian Epiphanius) believed these reluctant traitors to the faith should be welcomed joyfully back into the church. “Let that which is lamed not be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed,” he declared. “Peter spoke for mercy and kindness,” writes Epiphanius, “and Melitius and his supporters for truth and zeal.”4
But most of the imprisoned churchmen weren’t as merciful as Peter and quickly joined Melitius on the other side of the curtain. A small minority gathered around Peter. Newton sums up:
When he [Melitius] & Peter & other martyrs & Confessors were in prison together there arose a dispute about the reception of lapsed persons, Peter out of mercy being for a speedy reception & Melitius & Peleus & many other martyrs & confessors out of zeal for piety being for a competent time of penitence before they were received so that the sincerity of their penitence might first appear.5
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 9