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

by Charles Freeman

18. Athanassiadi and Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism, pp. 185–86 for the quote of Maximus and p. 20 for the quotation from the editors’ introduction. See further chap. 11 of this book for how the concept of the supreme deity was used by Constantine.

  19. For Mithraism, see chap. 6 of Beard, North and Price, Religions of Rome.

  20. “Middle Platonism” and “Neoplatonism” are terms that were developed in the nineteenth century. Their practitioners would have simply seen themselves as Platonists. Introduction can be found in R. Popkin, ed., The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1998; London, 1999), “Middle Platonism” by H. Tarrant and “Plotinus and Neoplatonism” by L. Gerson. There is a wealth of useful material in C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994). An important passage for Middle Platonists was the following from The Republic 509 B.

  The sun . . . not only makes the things we see visible, but causes the processes of generation, growth and nourishment, without itself being such a process . . . The Good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their existence and reality; yet it is not itself identical with reality, but is beyond reality, and superior to it in dignity and power.

  Translation H. D. P. Lee. Note the analogy between the sun and “the Good,” the definition of the sun/Good as an active, nurturing force, which is, however, independent from the process of nurturing, and the definition of “the Good” as “beyond reality.” These were all important concepts in Middle Platonism.

  21. The point is made by Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 78. Looking at oracles from the third century, Stephen Mitchell (Anatolia, vol. 2, p. 44) stresses:

  One notion that these oracles should dispel at once is that there was any dichotomy in the middle and later empire between rational thinkers, who based their religious and philosophical ideas on the exercise of a logical critique, and devotees of the god or of the gods, who relied for their religious intuitions on a form of divine inspiration which was denied to others . . . There is no evidence for any conflict between those who adhered to intellectual reasoning and those who simply turned to the god for instruction.

  The tradition of trying to reconcile Neoplatonist principles with empirical evidence was carried on in the works of Proclus, the fifth-century Athenian philosopher, the last of the “great” Greek thinkers. See L. Siorvanes, Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science (Edinburgh, 1996), especially chaps. 4 and 5.

  22. See Athanassiadi and Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism, p. 15, for examples.

  23. For instance, one can trace the career of one Quintus Lollius Urbicus, son of a Berber landowner in the province of Africa. He served first in Asia, then in Judaea, where he was involved in putting down the revolt of 132–35, then along the Rhine and Danube before being made governor in Britain. He ended his career as prefect of the city of Rome. Many of these themes can be traced in M. Goodman, The Roman World, 44 B.C.–A.D. 180 (London, 1997), and J. Huskinson, ed., Experiencing Rome (London, 2000).

  24. Beard, North and Price, Religions of Rome, p. 225.

  25. It is interesting in this context that one of the most important Stoic philosophers of the early second century A.D., Epictetus, was a freed slave, yet he may have been consulted by one emperor, Hadrian, and was certainly an influence on another, Marcus Aurelius.

  7

  1. In instructions to Julianus, proconsul of Africa, concerning the Manicheans. Quoted in S. Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London, 1985), p. 153.

  2. The third-century crisis tends to get neglected in accounts of the Roman empire as it is too late for many general books on the empire and too early for those on late antiquity. The Cambridge Ancient History volume on the period is still unpublished. See my Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, 1996), chap. 26, for a short overview (which draws, with his permission, on the chapter by John Drinkwater which will eventually appear in the Cambridge Ancient History).

  3. Williams, Diocletian, is a thorough treatment of Diocletian and is drawn on heavily for this chapter. See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (London, 1993).

  4. See S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), p. 107 and plate 10. This is an essential book for the study of the imperial ceremonies and creation of the emperor as a semi-divine figure.

  5. The point is made by J. W. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford, 1979), p. 243.

  6. M. Beard, J. North, S. Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 243. See also J. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford, 1995), in which he states (p. 259) that

  [Decius’] motive seems to have been a desire to join together, by force if necessary, all the inhabitants of the empire in one religious act. This was no doubt on one level an attempt to win back the favour of the gods in a time of crisis, but on another to establish among the inhabitants of the empire some sense of a shared religious identity.

  7. Quoted in Williams, Diocletian, p. 198.

  8. Without anticipating the argument, the following quotation from Rives, Religion and Authority, p. 251, is helpful.

  The fact that the great persecution of the Tetrarchs and the conversion of Constantine took place within a decade of each other was no coincidence, but a reflection of the ambivalence of the imperial elite. For their part, the leaders of the Christian community were increasingly ambivalent in their own attitudes towards the imperial government. To a large extent they viewed it as a source of oppression, but as their own concern with authority grew, they began to appreciate its exercise of a sort of authority that they lacked. As a result, Constantine discovered after his conversion that he shared many concerns with the leaders of the church.

  8

  1. There have been many scholars involved in reconstructing the life and teachings of Jesus within his Jewish heritage. The three I have drawn on here are Geza Vermes, W. D. Davies and E. P. Sanders. See, for instance, E. P. Sanders and W. D. Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” in William Horbury, W. D. Davies and John Sturdy, The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1999). One result of a deeper understanding of the Jewish roots of Christianity has been to defuse the anti-Semitism that has scarred the Christian experience so deeply. In 1999 the Catholic Church recognized “the weaknesses” shown “by so many of her sons and daughters” in this respect (Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican, December 1999), although the Church fell short of assuming any responsibility as an institution for teaching anti-Semitism. Jews themselves increasingly feel able to reclaim Jesus as part of their own inheritance. (It is always instructive, however, to read the entry “Jesus” in a dictionary of Judaism.) Here is a rare example where long years of patient academic study of ancient documents have proved able to dissolve deep-rooted prejudices (although no one, Christian or not, with a knowledge of European history can have failed to reflect on the underlying long-term causes of the Holocaust, which took part deep in a predominantly Christian Europe).

  2. G. Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus (London, 2000), p. 258.

  3. There is, of course, a mass of material on the Gospels. A useful starting point for contemporary thinking is the relevant entries in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997), and M. Coogan and B. Metzger, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford and New York, 1993). See also, for an overview, J. Court and K. Court, The New Testament World (Cambridge, 1999).

  4. For a summary of Jewish views on the afterlife, see L. Grabbe, Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period (London and New York, 2000), chap. 12, “Eschatologies and Ideas of Salvation.” See also the entry “Gehenna” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Adrian Hastings, writing o
n “hell” in A. Hastings, ed., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford and New York, 2000), notes: “It is especially the judgement scene as described in Matthew 25:31–46, one of the most influential of biblical passages, which has established the doctrine of hell, both theologically and for public imagination.” In particular, Augustine, who reinforced the concept of eternal punishment for western Christianity, used this text as backing.

  5. The quotation is taken from Court and Court, The New Testament World, p. 207. See this book for a discussion of all the Gospels and the contexts in which they were written. The fullest exposition of the essential Judaism of Matthew’s community is to be found in D. C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism (Edinburgh, 1998). Sim agrees with the traditional placing of Matthew’s community in Antioch and argues strongly that it should be seen as a sect within Judaism.

  6. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Harmondsworth, 1993), is a good starting point. A very well illustrated recent survey is J. R. Porter, Jesus Christ: The Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith (London, 1999). The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, ed. Markus Bockmuehl (Cambridge, 2001), has a series of essays on the quest for the historical Jesus. There is broad agreement in the Gospels over the “baptism” of Jesus by John the Baptist, although some scholars believe that Jesus was originally a follower of John’s and it was only later that the account of the baptism was developed to give him a higher status than John. The birth stories associated with Jesus are full of contradictions, and it is difficult to find any scholarly agreement, even over whether he was born in Bethlehem.

  7. See R. Horsley, “Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement,” in E. Mayes, ed., Galilee Through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures (Winona Lake, Ind., 1999). In his earlier work on Galilee, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (New York, 1985), Horsley explored the social tensions in Galilee in Jesus’ time and related his teachings to them. There is a mass of background material on first-century Galilee in E. W. Stegemann and W. Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Edinburgh, 1999). There was certainly a tradition of unrest in Galilee— Galileans were seen as making good fighters and providing revolutionary leaders, and many of the leaders of the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66 were from that area.

  8. For the relationship between Galilean and Judaean Judaism, see the detailed study by M. Goodman, “Galilean Judaism and Judaean Judaism,” chap. 19 in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3. The issue is also discussed by Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, pp. 225–26.

  9. A useful introduction is to be found in the entry “Judaism of the First Century A.D.,” in Coogan and Metzger, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Fuller treatments of particular groups are to be found in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism.

  10. The quotation on “children of light” and “darkness” comes from Dead Sea Scroll texts I QS I 3f 9f and is quoted in Otto Betz, “The Essenes,” chap. 15 in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism. The quotation on liberation comes from the same texts, 94Q521, and is from Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, p. 17.

  11. As an introduction to the concept, see the entries for “Messiah” in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford History of the Christian Church, and Coogan and Metzger, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible. A much fuller analysis from a Jewish perspective is to be found in chap. 13, “Messiahs,” in Grabbe, Judaic Religion. See also S. Freyne, Galilee and Gospel (Tubingen, 2000), chap. 11, “Messiah and Galilee,” where Freyne considers Messianism in a specifically Galilean context.

  12. M. Allen Powell, The Jesus Debate (Oxford, 1999), reviews the various historical interpretations of Jesus’ life and shows just how diverse the approaches are. Frances Young’s point is made in “A Cloud of Witnesses,” in J. Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate, 2nd ed. (London, 1993), p. 22. It is interesting to find that the theological presentations of Jesus have not obscured his essential humanity. “They seem to say he was a goodish kind of man,” says a Victorian costermonger interviewed by Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861–62), “but if he says as how a cove’s to forgive a feller who hits you, I should say he know’d nothing about it” (vol. 1, pp. 21, 40).

  13. Fredriksen’s point comes from her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (London, 2000), p. 268.

  14. On “the kingdom,” see the exhaustive discussion in E. P. Sanders and W. D. Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, pp. 636–49. Richard Horsley’s comment is to be found in “Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement,” in Mayes, ed., Galilee Through the Centuries, p. 68.

  15. Sanders and Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” p. 676. Geza Vermes’ views on the “Son of Man” title, of which he has made a particular study, are summarized in his The Changing Faces of Jesus, pp. 38–41 and 175–77.

  16. The subject is well covered by E. P. Sanders in his “Contention and Opposition in Galilee,” chap. 14 in The Historical Figure of Jesus (Harmondworth, 1993). The reasons for John’s execution are also discussed, pp. 93–95.

  17. The responsibility for arresting Jesus has been placed by scholars on virtually every group including Jews outside the priesthood, the priesthood, and the Romans (see Sanders and Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” p. 668, for the range of interpretations), but the central role of Caiaphas, who was responsible for keeping order in the city, seems likely. Richard Horsley makes the following point:

  Jesus’ agenda of renewing Israel required what must be seen as a challenge to illegitimate rulers and/or as an attempt to reach out to the rest of Israel from the capital. Israelite tradition was rich with prophetic precedents of challenge to and condemnation of—or simply laments over—the ruling institutions and their families.

  “Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement” in Mayes, Galilee Through the Centuries, p. 73.

  18. The earliest representation is actually an anti-Christian taunt from a third-century graffito in Rome mocking a Christian called Alexamenos, who is shown worshipping a donkey hanging from a cross. One of the earliest “public” Christian representations, on the fifth-century wooden door of Santa Sabina in Rome, shows Christ with his arms outstretched and nail marks in them but no actual cross behind him. The elaboration of Christ’s suffering on the cross was a much later development in Christian iconography. The issue is well dealt with in Robin Margaret Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London and New York, 2000), chap. 5, “Images of the Suffering Redeemer.” 19. See chap. 17, “Epilogue: The Resurrection” in E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Harmondsworth, 1993). For a traditional perspective, see Markus Bockmuehl, “Resurrection,” chap. 7 in Bockmuehl, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jesus. In her book The Gnostic Gospels (London, 1980), chap. 1, E. Pagels suggests a battle for control over the resurrection experience, one in which Peter attempts to claim the earliest experience of the resurrection in order to justify his leadership of the church. This explains why Paul, who reports Peter’s claim that he was the first, is also so keen to equate his own experience on the road to Damascus with those of the disciples. Pagels suggests that the Catholic Church was to insist on the primacy of Peter’s experience of the resurrection, followed by that of the remaining Apostles, in order to sustain the idea of apostolic succession, so crucial to upholding church hierarchy and tradition.

  From earliest times concerns have been raised over the credibility of the resurrection accounts. They were dismissed by pagans as “a fable or the report of a hysterical woman.” The theologian Origen (who will be discussed in detail in chap. 10) made a Platonic distinction between the few who could grasp the allegorical meaning of the resurrection, “that in the body there lies a certain principle which is not corrupted from which the body is rais
ed in corruption”—not the same body that died but a body appropriate to the new and immortal life—and the many who could only grasp a literal explanation (that Jesus’ actual body was raised) “preached in the churches for the simpleminded and for the ears of the common crowd who are led on to lead better lives by their belief.” (See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) [Chicago and London, 1971], pp. 30 and 48.)

  Powell, The Jesus Debate, p. 191, notes that the Jesus Seminar, a group of theologians and historians who vote on contentious issues in Jesus’ life, decided by “a large majority” that Jesus’ resurrection did not involve the resuscitation of a corpse. (Note, however, that the Jesus Seminar is regarded as radical by traditionalists.) This is in line with Paul’s view. However, if the risen Jesus was not his own corpse resuscitated, where did this go? The earliest account (Mark 16:1–8, the last verses of the original Gospel) suggests that when the disciples came across the opened tomb, there was a man in white robes inside telling them they would see the risen Jesus in Galilee. There is a possible explanation in terms of Caiaphas’ own desperate need to deal with Jesus’ followers without further trouble. So long as they believed his actual body was in the tomb, they could be expected to congregate there and keep the movement alive. There is increasing evidence, archaeological and otherwise, of “cults of the dead” in Palestine during this period, which would explain why Jesus’ tomb might become a centre of cult worship. See L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Divines, Sages: A Socio-Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge, Pa., 1995), pp. 141–45. Taking the body out (and making it clear that it had gone by leaving the tomb open) would dissolve this possibility, but Caiaphas, anxious to settle things down while Pilate was still in Jerusalem, needed to go further. He had to find a way of persuading the disciples to return home to Galilee, out of his jurisdiction and back into that of Herod Antipas. So a messenger is left telling them that the body is gone but Jesus would rise in Galilee if they would return there. If there is any truth in this account it was, of course, essential that Jesus’ body was not produced by Caiaphas or his associates, as it would undermine any reason for the disciples returning to Galilee. One assumes that there would be no incentive for preserving it anyway. Matthew suggests that Caiaphas used Roman guards on the tomb so that the disciples would not take Jesus’ body away, but when the body was discovered missing, these were bribed by the chief priests to tell Pilate that the body had been taken by the disciples. There could be hidden in this story an attempt by the chief priests to cover up the fact that they had arranged the body’s removal.