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

by Charles Freeman

  29. Definitions of these “heresies” and alternative interpretations can be found in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997). The Sabellians used the sun as an analogy. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the equivalent of the heat, light and what Sabellius called “the astrological energy” of the sun, in other words different manifestations of the same essence.

  30. See the article “Soul” in A. D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 1999), and Kallistos Ware, “The Soul in Greek Christianity,” in M. James and C. Crabbe, eds., From Soul to Self (London and New York, 1999), p. 53. Thomas Aquinas was to talk of the “ensouled body,” deliberately turning his back on Plato’s conception (see chap. 20 of this book). The mind/body debate so beloved of philosophers is tied in with all this.

  31. An interesting example is the Song of Solomon, which most would read at face value and without qualms as a mildly erotic love poem. However, the Church Fathers were deeply troubled by any hint of sexuality, and Origen interpreted the Song as an allegory of God’s relations with the individual soul, an approach that removed the sexual “danger” implicit in a straightforward reading of it. The “allegorical” approach to biblical interpretation taken by Origen was followed by Jerome and Augustine.

  32. The first quotation is taken from Origen’s Contra Celsum 4:99. The second is from J. Clark Smith, The Ancient Wisdom of Origen (London and Toronto, 1992), p. 52. There is an echo here of Homer’s depiction of the gods returning all to how it used to be; see chap. 2, note 7 above.

  33. From Pindar, Nemean Ode 6, trans. R. Buxton.

  34. See the individual entries for the early popes in J. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes (Oxford, 1986). A good study of the psychology and impact of martyrdom is to be found in R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London, 1986), chap. 9. I wonder whether an analogy might be made between the memory of martyrdoms and the memory of the Holocaust, both of which seem to have intensified rather than diminished through time.

  35. R. Stark, in his The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, 1996), makes some calculations in chap. 1. His estimate of the Christian population for A.D. 274 is 4.2 percent for the whole empire, and he compares this with evidence from Egypt, a more heavily Christianized part of the empire, that suggests that just over 10 percent of the population there were Christian by this date. Whether these figures mean anything is open to doubt. There was no clear definition of what it meant to be a Christian in the third century, and, as has been seen, many religious movements included Christ among their spiritual leaders, so it is hard to see how any valid calculations could be made. Again, one has only to read of the mass rejection of their faith by Christians at times of persecution in north Africa to realize how fluid a conception “being a Christian” was. See also K. Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implication,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 185–226.

  36. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, p. 40. A useful account of the growth of Christianity in Asia Minor in this period is to be found in Mitchell’s study Anatolia, vol. 2, chaps. 16 (pp. 37–42) and 17. Mitchell suggests that Phrygia was perhaps the most highly Christianized part of the empire by 300, but he emphasizes that while some communities in the province were heavily Christian, others were still largely pagan. As he puts it, a map of cities highlighting those that were Christian would “resemble an irregular patchwork quilt, not a simple monochrome blanket” (p. 63).

  11

  1. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 130. See the new edition of Eusebius: Life of Constantine, trans. with introduction and commentary by A. Cameron and S. Hall (Oxford, 1999), and pp. 27–48 of the editors’ introduction in particular for an assessment of the work in literary terms.

  2. H. A. Drake, “Constantine and Consensus,” Church History 64 (1995): 7. Drake has now expanded his argument in Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore and London, 2000).

  3. For a survey of Constantine’s life, see H. Pohlsander, Constantine the Emperor (London, 1997); the chapters on Constantine in A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (London, 1993); and D. Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian (London, 1978).

  4. S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), p. 108.

  5. Ibid., pp. 106–15, for Constantine’s definition of his own legitimacy.

  6. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine, 1:28–32.

  7. Ibid., 1:27. See J. W. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford, 1979), pp. 278–80, for comment.

  8. H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore and London, 2000).

  9. The decree is given in full in N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire (New York, 1995), pp. 602–4, from which this translation is taken. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 195, stresses the importance of the edict in proclaiming freedom of worship, and on p. 249 he quotes the pagan orator Themistius (second half of the fourth century) addressing the emperor Valens as follows:

  The law of God and your law remains unchanged for ever—that the mind of each and every man should be free to follow the way of worship which it thinks [to be best]. This is a law against which no confiscation, no crucifixion, no death at the stake has ever availed; you may hale and kill the body, if so be that this comes to pass; but the mind will escape you, taking with it freedom of thought and the right of the law as it goes, even if it is subject to force in the language used by the tongue.

  10. For the arch, see Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian, pp. 24–28, and A. Claridge, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 272–76.

  11. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change, pp. 283–84.

  12. P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990), p. 125. There is also the prayer of St. Francis: “Praise be to you, oh God my Lord, and to all your creatures, and above all to their great brother the sun, who brings the day and illumines with his light; and he is beautiful and brilliantly radiant; he is the symbol of you, oh Lord.”

  13. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change, p. 300. In Life of Constantine 2:48, Eusebius quotes a decree that Constantine sent out to the eastern provinces which, in its insistence on the natural order of things, suggests a Stoic influence. It begins:

  Everything embraced by the sovereign laws of nature provides everybody with sufficient evidence of the providence and thoughtfulness of the divine ordering; nor is there any doubt among those whose intellect approaches that topic by a correct scientific method, that accurate apprehension by a healthy mind and by sight itself rise in a single impulse of true virtue to the true knowledge of God.

  Compare chap. 9, note 16, above.

  14. Quoted in M. Beard, J. North and S. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, 1998), vol. 1, p. 367.

  15. Ibid., p. 370.

  16. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 230, makes this important point. For the elimination of the Donatists, see chap. 18.

  17. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 3:4. The quotation from Constantine’s address is from Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 4. One dispute between rival bishops in Ancyra in Galatia was described (to a synod of bishops meeting in Africa in 343) as follows:

  Houses were burned down and all manner of fighting broke out. Priests were dragged naked to the forum by the bishop himself . . . he profaned the sacred Host of the Lord by hanging it openly and in public from the necks of priests, and with horrendous barbarity tore the vestments from holy virgins dedicated to God and Christ, and displayed them naked before the public in the forum, in the middle of the city.

  18. See R. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988); M. Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism Through the Centuries (Oxford, 1996); and D. Williams, Ambrose of Mi
lan and the End of Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995), for recent surveys of the issues and of traditional historiography. There is also an excellent survey of the controversy as it took place over the fourth century in R. Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford, 2000). Eunomius was the most articulate defender of the extreme Arian position that the Father and the Son are to be seen as dissimilar to each other.

  19. Quotation from Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 9.

  20. The examples come from ibid., chap. 1.

  21. Ibid., p. 17.

  22. R. Hanson, “The Achievement of the Orthodoxy in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in R. Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989), p. 153. J. Pelikan notes four different approaches to the Christ as God debate, all of which could draw on scriptural backing: (1) Christ was born a man but became divine either at his baptism or at his resurrection. (2) Christ was fully God from eternity and to be equated with the Yahweh of the Old Testament. (3) There were two distinct “Lords,” God and Jesus. (4) There was a Father who had a son, who is referred to in the scriptures as variously Son, Spirit, the logos, even an angel, but always in a context that suggested he was subordinate to the Father. (See Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) [Chicago and London, 1971], p. 175.) This simply underlines one of the major problems in Christian doctrine. Everyone felt that scriptural backing was important, but the sheer diversity of texts meant that almost any formulation of doctrine could find support from one text or another. It is hardly surprising that the church had eventually to assume absolute authority over the interpretation of scripture, a development that had the effect, of course, of stifling debate.

  23. See the article on Arianism by R. Williams in E. Ferguson, ed., Encyclopaedia of Early Christianity (Chicago and London, 1990), p. 85.

  24. Again see ibid. for some of the variations of Arianism.

  25. Quoted in Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 240.

  26. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 3:10. See also Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian, p. 70, and R. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988), chap. 6.

  27. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 253, note 2.

  28. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, looks at the evidence on pp. 190–202. There is also an excellent account in C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 14, “Unity of Substance.”

  29. See Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, p. 169, for this idea. As H. Chadwick notes in his “Orthodoxy and Heresy,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 573, “the epithet homoousios was an ordinary term in Plotinus’ vocabulary.” The response of the Cappadocian Fathers to homoousios as a term is discussed by J. Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven and London, 1993), p. 43.

  30. Kee, Constantine Versus Christ (London, 1982), p. 15.

  31. Hanson, The Search for Christian Doctrine of God, deals with Eusebius’ letter on pp. 163–66. Hanson’s analysis of the terminology is invaluable.

  32. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, p. 203.

  33. Once again Hanson’s analysis of the twists and turns in the attempt to accommodate the council’s creed (The Search for Christian Doctrine of God, chap. 10) is masterly. See D. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, p. 16, for Ossius and Serdica. The full text of the western bishops’ statement at Serdica is given in Hanson at pp. 301–2. As Hanson makes clear (p. 303), Ossius was not at home with Greek philosophy and the statement is “confused.”

  34. D. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, p. 15. Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus, notes on p. 151: “Over the next fifteen years [from the death of Constantine in 337] the Creed of Nicaea was more ignored than opposed, even by those who were later considered ‘Nicene.’ During this period, public ecclesiastical loyalty tended to be expressed in terms of political and theological loyalty to specific bishops.” Vaggione goes on to argue that accounts of the controversy written from hindsight in the following century, by which time the Nicene Creed was enshrined as orthodoxy, tended to describe the leading figures of the period in terms of their allegiance, or otherwise, to the Nicene Creed even though no defined parties emerged until the 350s.

  35. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, chap. 8, “Controlling the Message.” Drake shows how Constantine used texts from the Bible to isolate the more intransigent of the Christians from the majority, whom he wished to keep on his side.

  36. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change, p. 281.

  37. In Cameron and Hall, eds., Eusebius, the editors state that the sources for the assertion that he did “are tendentious: the extent to which Constantine did attempt to suppress pagan worship [including sacrifice] is therefore disputed.” They go on to provide references to recent articles on the issue (pp. 319–20). If Drake’s thesis is accepted, it is unlikely that Constantine felt strongly about the issue, but it should be noted that by now many sophisticated pagans had themselves rejected sacrifices.

  38. D. Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian, p. 33. For Constantine’s legislation see A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (London, 1993), p. 58. The influential legend that Helena found “the True Cross” in the Holy Land appears only much later, for the first time in 395, when it was mentioned in an oration by Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It is not mentioned in Eusebius’ biography, an omission which suggests that it is a later development in Christian mythology. Despite this later date, Helena’s “finding of the True Cross” has proved to be one of the most influential of Christian legends, and even recently it has been argued that the titulus, the board bearing the inscription “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” from the cross survives in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome (Matthew D’Ancona and Carsten Peter Thiede, The Quest for the True Cross [London, 2000]). In view of the embarrassment and shame Christ’s crucifixion caused to his followers, it seems highly unlikely that they would have preserved the cross. It is also worth mentioning that another complete “True Cross” is recorded in Jerusalem in the seventh century. It was looted from there by the Persians but returned to the city by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in 630.

  39. For Constantinople, see the relevant chapters in R. Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals (Berkeley, 1983), and Christopher Kelly, “Empire Building,” in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999).

  40. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 3:48 for Constantinople as a Christian capital. For the pagan statues, see ibid., 3:54, and the comments on the passage made by the editors on pp. 301–3. Later (tolerant) attitudes to pagan art in Constantinople are discussed in C. Mango, “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, no. 17 (1963): 55–75. The same point could be made of Constantine’s activities in Rome, as it was by the anti-clerical Italian aristocrat Count Leopoldo Cicognera in his history of sculpture (Venice, 1813–18):

  The same hand that raised so many basilicas to the true God was also generous in beautifying and restoring the temples of the gods in Rome; and the medals that were issued in his imperial mint carried the images and attributes of Jupiter, Apollo, Mars and Hercules, while through the apotheosis of his father Constantius he added a new deity to Mount Olympus.

  41. See C. Kelly, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity, for details of the ceremony of dedication and the building of the city. A story was told by later Byzantine writers that hidden underneath the column was an ancient statue of Pallas Athene, which had been taken to Rome by Aeneas after the sack of Troy and then secretly brought on by Constantine for his new city.

  42. See my The Horses of St. Mark’s in European History (forthcoming, London, 2004), where it is argued that it was the set of horses associated in later sources with Constantine’s golden chariot that were the ones selected by th
e Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo for Venice after the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians in 1204.

  43. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 3:49. In her book Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London and New York, 1994), Vasiliki Limberis argues that Constantine was deliberately setting out “to make Christianity a Greco-Roman civic religion” (p. 27). He could do this because his new foundation had no pre-existing Christian community with which he had to compromise, so he was able to create his own ceremonies without opposition.

  44. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 4:24.

  45. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony, p. 122, with her illustrations nos. 33 and 34.

  46. Cameron and Hall, eds., Life of Constantine 1:6.

  47. New Catholic Encyclopaedia (Washington D.C., 1967), entry on “Conscientious Objection.” The comparison with the pre-Constantine period makes the point. There were those such as Marcellus the Centurion who refused to fight for the state. He threw off his arms and proclaimed to his superiors that “a Christian who is in the service of the Lord Christ should not serve the affairs of this world.” As a result he was made a saint (see entry for Marcellus in D. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of the Saints, 4th ed. [Oxford, 1997]). The adoption of Christianity by the state made this approach impossible. For the Sala di Constantino, see the description in Loren Partridge, The Renaissance in Rome (London, 1996), p. 152.

  48. The quotation comes from De Fide 2:16. It appears to have been written about the time of the devastating Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378. A common Christian symbol from the fourth century onward was a chi-ro placed above a cross, a composition adapted from a Roman cavalry standard. In later centuries, there was a relative lack of inhibition as regards Christians fighting wars (despite a doctrine of the conditions for “a just war” elaborated by Thomas Aquinas). Augustine had argued that a soldier who killed in war was not guilty of sin so long as he acted under the orders of a recognized authority, even if that authority or the war itself was unjust (see C. Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity [Oxford, 2000], p. 291), and in practice the doctrine of “a just war” proved elastic as the number of cases where both Christian sides to a conflict have relied on it shows. As an example of the lack of inhibition, one can take the outspoken remarks of A. F. Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London, during the First World War, a war fought between Christian nations. The war was, he proclaimed, “a great crusade to kill Germans, to kill them not for the sake of killing but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old . . . ,” and on a later occasion he called the war “. . . a war for purity, for freedom, for international honour and for the principles of Christianity . . . everyone who dies in it is a martyr.” Quoted in N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998), pp. 208–9. There is, of course, a deep-rooted Christian pacifist tradition, but the point made here can be underlined by realizing how impossible it would be for an Anglican bishop of the period to have argued, for instance, for a less rigorous approach to the ethics of sexuality. There is much to reflect on here, but a knowledge of why Christianity and war became so closely linked in Constantine’s reign and those of his successors does help clarify matters. Christianity is not easily separated from the specific historical circumstances in which it developed, but at least these circumstances can be recognized.