The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  In elaborating his views on everyday conduct Paul had two particular preoccupations. Paul was true to his Jewish inheritance in deploring idols, and he denounced their worship. Here again he was challenging the deep-rooted spiritual traditions of the Greco-Roman world, which allowed the gods to be shown in human form and cult worship to be offered to statues. Now Paul insisted that Christians must remove statues of gods and goddesses from temples and public places. During Paul’s lifetime Christians would have been unable to desecrate pagan temples without massive retaliation, but by the fourth century Paul’s teachings, supported by Old Testament texts, were used to justify the wholesale destruction of pagan art and architecture. There were, nevertheless, tensions within Christianity itself over the issue. From early times Christians were scratching symbols and painting representations of Old and New Testament stories in their tombs; later Christians created reliefs and actual statues. As the adulation of relics developed, the boundary between simple representation of Christian stories and objects and the worship of idols became increasingly blurred. Eventually there were to be major reactions within Christianity (the iconoclast movement in Byzantium and the wholesale destruction of Catholic art during the Reformation are only two examples).21

  Secondly, Paul appears preoccupied with the evils of sexuality. In Romans he fulminated against “filthy enjoyments and the practices with which they [non-Christians] dishonour their own bodies” and “degrading passions,” which cause both sexes to commit homosexual acts (Romans 1:24–32). And in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11: “You know perfectly well that people who do wrong will not inherit the kingdom of God: people of immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers . . .” “Sex,” he tells the Corinthians, “is always a danger.” Paul stresses the value of celibacy, his own chosen path, but he accepts the importance of marriage, not least as a means of containing sexual desire; as his much quoted phrase puts it: “Better to marry than to burn.” Although Judaism had always stressed the value of continence (“The Law recognises no sexual connections, except the natural union of man and wife, and that only for the procreation of children”),22 Paul’s strictures and the central place given to sexual “sins” in his theology suggest that the act of sex in itself troubled him deeply. (While Jesus went beyond conventional Jewish teaching in his prohibition of divorce, perhaps because family structures were under particular stress in first-century Galilee, he does not appear to have been preoccupied with sexuality in the way that Paul was.) Before Paul sex was not seen to raise major ethical problems, although sexual behaviour in the Greek world was constrained by deeply held conventions.23 There were those Greeks who valued celibacy in so far as it allowed the mind to concentrate on philosophy, but a positive acceptance of celibacy was seldom accompanied by passionate rejection of the desires of the body. Most Greeks accepted sexual desire as a natural part of being human, which could be sublimated, temporarily or permanently, in the service of other values. The body as such was neutral. Paul introduced a very different view of sexuality (although one can see analogies in Plato’s approach to sensual desire). As Peter Brown puts it, for Paul “the body was not a neutral thing, placed between nature and the city. Paul set it firmly in place as a temple of the Holy Spirit, subject to limits that it was sacrilegious to overstep.”24 The idea of the body as a “temple” that can be desecrated by sexual activity has been extraordinarily influential in Christianity, as can be seen in the enormous energy still devoted to debates on sexuality within the churches.

  Central to Paul’s teachings, therefore, is the condemnation of a variety of activities: idol worship, sexuality and—implicitly—the practice of philosophy. The roots of Paul’s beliefs appear to be diverse. He drew on traditional Jewish teaching for his views on idols, possibly the Essenes and his own personality for his views on sexuality—while his condemnation of philosophy may have been evoked by his need to defend faith over reason. The punishment for following condemned practices is, for Paul, exclusion (here again there is a strong possibility of Essene influence), and although alternatives to permanent exclusion and/or punishment can be drawn from others of Paul’s statements, these were not the ones that were to prevail. Guy Stroumsa has argued that the power of an insider/outsider dichotomy was intensified by the emphasis on the universality of the Christian message. “By right, the Christian community must include all mankind. A refusal to join the community of believers reflects a perverse and rather shocking vice.”25 The stress on perfection laid on Christians by Paul and other Christian leaders inevitably resulted in tensions that were projected onto those outsiders who refused to join the community, as can be seen in Paul’s own letters, especially the first chapter of Romans. “Since they [the unbelievers] refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour” (Romans 1:28). This approach certainly does much to explain the reactions of Christians to “outsiders” both before and after the granting of toleration to Christianity in the fourth century.

  No one reading Paul can ignore the powerful emotional force of this message: human beings live at the centre of a cosmic drama that reaches to the core of each personality as the forces of good and evil battle within the individual. Paul tells the Romans (7:14–20) that “I have been sold as a slave to sin. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate . . . I know of nothing good living in me.” The battle is not won until death, and the believer receives his reward with God. “The man who thinks he is safe must be careful that he does not fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). It could be suggested that this stress on the fragmented personality that can never be at peace with itself until the final salvation through Christ is among the most enduring of Paul’s legacies. It is certainly a feature that strikingly marks out the Christian thinkers discussed in this book from their pagan counterparts (Stoics and Epicureans, for instance), who tended, although this must be a generalization, to deal with the challenges of life more calmly. 26

  Not least of Paul’s legacies was his providing of an institutional framework for the church. By fixing on a comprehensible symbol, the death and resurrection of Christ, and by proclaiming the enormous and imminent rewards of Christian faith (and the awful consequences of rejection of “the cross of Christ”), Paul had created a focus for community worship. When the second coming failed to materialize, this had to be sustained in an institutional form. Paul cannot be given credit for founding every Christian community—the Christian churches in Antioch and Rome were founded without his direct influence or involvement, and there is no evidence of his having any contact with the church of Alexandria, soon to be one of the most important in the Mediterranean, or with the many communities of north Africa—but he did nevertheless provide a hugely significant impetus. However, it pays to be cautious here. While the letter to the Galatians is often seen to be one of Paul’s finest, there is no material evidence of any surviving Galatian Christian community, nor of a Colossian one: the first archaeological evidence for Christianity in these areas comes centuries later. It is quite possible therefore that Paul’s communities lapsed. He certainly seems to have been responsible for suggesting ways in which commitment to the Christian community could be expressed (through the rite of baptism) and sustained (through the Eucharist). His first letter to the Corinthians insists on the importance of all, whether rich or poor, sharing a communal meal at which bread is eaten and wine is drunk in commemoration of Christ’s death (1 Corinthians 11:17–34). This letter dates from about A.D. 55, and some scholars suggest that it was Paul who, drawing on what he had heard from the Apostles of the Last Supper, established the Eucharist as a repeatable ritual. The Gospel writers, writing later than this, of course, may have recast their own descriptions of the Last Supper to accord with the existing practice of emerging Christian groups. 27

  In time, the Christian communities also needed some kind of administrative structure. Here a
gain the influence of Judaism was profound. The earliest communities seem to have been led by presbyters who played a comparable role to the elders of a Jewish synagogue. Over time the need arose for a more senior figure, and again Judaism may have provided a model. The Essenes had acknowledged the need for a guardian who “shall instruct the Congregation in the works of God . . . he shall love them as a Father loves his children and shall carry them in his distress like a shepherd his sheep.”28 Such a role is echoed in descriptions of bishops in the letters to Timothy and Titus (neither by Paul and both written after his death). By the second century the bishop was accepted as the senior figure of a Christian community, with the presbyters (or priests as they in effect became) as his delegates. Increasingly, the priesthood became a distinct elite within a community, and only priests could administer the sacraments or offer interpretations of the scriptures. So began the evolution of institutional authority within the early church, a development that opened the way to conflict with rival sects such as the Montanists, who believed Christian revelation could come at any time to those who were open to it. The Greek word used for bishop, episcopos, traditionally referred to a secular administrative official, reflecting the fact that bishops had an administrative as well as pastoral role from early times.

  Paul’s influence has been immense—E. P. Sanders is surely right to call the Epistle to the Romans, which treats most of Paul’s theological themes, “one of the most influential documents of western history.” 29 It takes considerable imagination to conceive what form Christianity would have taken without his highly original and utterly distinctive formulations of Christian belief: institutionally, Christianity might have faltered without him. The richness and evocative power of his language still inspires. Paul’s theology, however, is confined in that it is shaped by his personal isolation, his acute insecurity about his authority and his ambivalence about his Jewish roots. The difficult circumstances in which he wrote can explain much of the incoherence and contradiction in his letters, which have taxed theologians ever since. He seems to have failed to absorb, or at least express in his letters, any real awareness of Jesus as a human being, or to reflect his teachings, other than, significantly, the prohibition on divorce. It has always to be remembered that Paul is the only major Christian theologian never to have read the Gospels, and one cannot be sure that he interpreted Jesus’ teachings, on the Law, for instance, with accuracy. Can one assume that Paul preached what Jesus would have wanted him to preach? It is worth reiterating that his theology was conditioned by his belief in the imminence of the second coming. Had Paul known that the second coming was to be delayed indefinitely, his theology may well have taken a different direction and would certainly have lost much of its sense of urgency (although a sense of urgency in general seems to have been an intrinsic part of Paul’s personality). Furthermore, although his theology appears to be radically new, conceptually it is still rooted deeply in the Jewish (and perhaps to some extent the Essene) tradition. The paradox of Paul is that while he created a Christianity for the Greco-Roman world, he also confirmed or implanted within Christian theology elements that set it in conflict with Greco-Roman society and traditions, over sexuality, art and philosophy. Greeks were asked either to turn their backs on significant aspects of their traditional culture or to risk eternal condemnation. This aspect of Paul’s teachings is often neglected in surveys of his theology, but the history of Christianity, in particular the relationship between Christians and the pagan world in the fourth century, a period when Paul’s influence was very powerful, cannot be fully understood without it.

  Paul cannot have expected his writings to have lasted—the second coming, the day of judgment, would have swept them into oblivion, their purpose in bringing some to salvation achieved. So it is again paradoxical that they not only survived but were placed alongside the Gospels and given, like them, canonical status as sacred texts. They were first collected by a fervent admirer, Marcion. Marcion, apparently the son of an early Christian bishop, was from Sinope on the Black Sea, but he moved to Rome, where he came deeply under the influence of Paul. He collected the texts of ten of Paul’s letters, to which he added an edited version of Luke’s Gospel to make the first canon of New Testament texts. Marcion went further. He believed that Paul had grasped the essential fact that Jesus was the instrument of a new God, one who was “placid, mild, and simply good and excellent,” and thus entirely different from the God of the Old Testament, who was “lustful for war, inconstant in his attitudes and self-contradictory.”30 For Marcion, there was no way in which there could be a reconciliation between these two very different gods. Paul was, therefore, right to reject the Law of the Old Testament God, but, according to Marcion, the Hebrew scriptures should also be discarded by Christians on the grounds that Christ offered the world a totally new beginning. The idea that one god or set of gods could overthrow or otherwise replace another ran, of course, deep in Greek mythology. The Olympian gods had overthrown the Titans, and their power was demonstrated by their success in doing so. So, for Marcion, the Christian God too had demonstrated His power by overthrowing an old, untrustworthy and warlike God and his Law.

  Marcion was excommunicated by the Roman church in 144, although his ideas continued to prove highly popular, and Marcionite communities flourished well into the third century.31 In response, his opponents created their own canon of New Testament writings, including all the four canonical Gospels together with thirteen of Paul’s letters. The “orthodox” Christians also reasserted their commitment to the Hebrew scriptures, so effectively that no challenge to their inclusion in the Christian canon has ever been raised subsequently. So began the formation of the Christian Bible as a set of disparate texts from Jewish history and the early Christian communities, which was, however, to share a common authority as the word of the Christian God. Within these texts, those of Paul were deeply embedded and his authority was assured.

  Meanwhile, Paul’s conflict with the Jerusalem Christians over the requirements for entry into a Christian community remained unresolved. According to the surviving sources (Galatians 2:11–14), the conflict reached its most personal and bitter moments when Paul and Peter confronted each other in Antioch. This conflict may have had important consequences. It has been argued that Matthew’s community in its determination to maintain itself as a Christian community within Judaism, and thus faithful to the Law, had to define itself against the teachings of Paul with their insistence that the Law had been superseded.32 This could explain why Matthew, in opposition to Paul, lays such powerful emphasis on the continuation of the Law (in statements of Jesus such as 15:24, where he says that he has come only to the “lost sheep of Israel,” and 5:17: “I have come not to abolish [the Law and the Prophets] but to complete them” [my emphases]). In effect, Matthew is using Jesus to challenge Paul’s claim to authority, and this raises again the question of whether Paul interpreted Jesus’s teachings accurately. Furthermore, if Paul’s leadership is rejected by Matthew, then where better for his community to look for inspiration than from Paul’s rival, Peter, who would have been known to the Antioch Jewish Christians from his time (one tradition says some seven years) in the city and who would presumably have supported their continuing adherence to Jewish requirements?

  Matthew stresses Peter’s closeness to Jesus, perhaps again to distance his community from Paul. “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church,” says Jesus in what has become, once it was used to justify the primacy of the bishops of Rome as successors to Peter, historically one of the most influential phrases of the New Testament. Evidence that supports the argument that Matthew’s community was Jewish and rejected the attempts of Paul to supplant the Law can be found in the writings of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (died c. 200). Describing a Jewish sect, the Ebionites, he notes: “They use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law.”33

  With the destruction of the Temple at the hands o
f the Romans in A.D. 70, however, Jewish Christianity began to wither. Peter, Paul and James were all, if tradition is sound, martyred in the 60s, and in the intense passions raised by the Jewish revolt it appears that the loyalty of even those Christians who continued to follow Jewish Law and rituals was suspect. The future was to lie with the Gentile churches. While the earliest Jewish Christians had been able to make some, if uneasy, accommodation with the society in which they lived, Gentile Christianity, through Paul, had declared war on the Greco-Roman world, its gods, its idols and its mores. So we must see the early Christian communities as introspective and exclusive, even dysfunctional, in relation to their surroundings. Paul himself recognized their isolation (1 Corinthians 1:23): “While the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom here are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness.” The Greeks or Romans could not be expected to offer any support or particular tolerance for a movement that rejected such significant aspects of their culture. The isolation of the Christian communities was to be further deepened by their increasing rejection of their connection with Judaism. Christians desperately needed to find coherence in their beliefs and unity in their communities if they were to survive at all. This is the context within which the fledgling Christian churches developed; it does much to explain the search for authority which was to preoccupy them from the earliest times and help make Christianity so distinctive among rival spiritual movements.