Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Augustine can come up with no answer other than the willful rejection of the presence of God by a man who has obscured any supreme being from memory—just as a baby commits sins without knowing what he is doing. “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.”27 (Italics mine.) Only when Augustine recognizes divine beauty through an act of free will—conversion—does God enter what would today be called his long-term memory. Thus, the gripping, extended passages on memory hold an atheist only until the appearance of the contrived (too contrived even for many devout religious believers) device portraying the entry of a supreme being—a real deus ex machina—into a previously empty storage unit. What follows, though—the conclusion of Augustine’s personal story—is even stranger and more off-putting. Having renounced women and volitional, consensual sex, Augustine is still concerned about the sexual evil he may commit when his free will is weakened by sleep. He is concerned, to put it bluntly, about wet dreams. Despite his vow of continence, which he keeps by day, Augustine is unable to repress sexual images in his sleep. “But there yet live in my memory (whereof I have much spoken) the images of such things, as my ill custom there fixed…in sleep, not only so as to give pleasure, but even to obtain assent, and what is very like reality.” He expresses the hope that God will increase his grace “to quench even the impure motions of my sleep!”28

  Wet dreams do not fit the free-will paradigm explaining the existence of evil, but Augustine gets around this problem by reasoning, quite reasonably, that sleep is a state in which the will of human beings is considerably attenuated. Because we are stained by nature, there can be no complete and perfect union with God—no complete conversion, if you will—until the afterlife. There are limits, therefore, to “free will.” Although Augustine explicitly denies this elsewhere in his memoir, he cannot ignore the evidence of his own experience.

  The dispiriting conclusion of the long, initially splendid section on memory, which falls back on divine grace as the only possible antidote to the commission of unintended sin, explains (like his ruminations on infant sins) why Augustine’s thought would one day become a pillar of Calvinist theology. It also explains why wet dreams figure less prominently than discourses about divine love in centuries of Christian commentary on Confessions. Nocturnal emissions strike a less-than-lofty note, although the note was supplied by the author himself, near the end of what is considered by many Christians to be the second-greatest conversion story ever told, outshone only by the rudely and divinely interrupted horseback ride on the road to Damascus.

  * * *

  * The degree to which “vincible ignorance” can sometimes be a mitigating factor in sinfulness is a subject of some dispute among those who care about such distinctions. A child living in a community with strict penalties for desertion to another faith, for instance, might not be considered as guilty as an adult for failing to embrace the Christian message. Every adult Jew within reach of the Christian message in late antiquity—and that would have meant just about every Jew residing within the borders of the Roman Empire—would be in a state of vincible ignorance for which there could be no moral excuse.

  2

  THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE, THE EMPIRE

  BY 415, when Augustine was presiding as bishop of Hippo in North Africa and emerging as one of the church’s most influential theologians for time and eternity, nearly 350 years had passed since stories began circulating around the Mediterranean world about the fateful fall off a horse by one Jew, Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus. Improbably, Saul’s embrace of another Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, as the Messiah foretold in ancient Hebrew prophecies had, by Augustine’s time, begun to reshape the religious and political character of the Roman Empire in ways that would define and redefine Western history for the next fifteen hundred years.

  The year 415 also marks the murder of Hypatia, a mathematician who has also been called the last pagan philosopher, by a Christian mob in Alexandria. Hypatia’s birth date is uncertain; it may have been as early as 350 or as late as 360. We owe much, arguably all, of our modern knowledge about Hypatia’s death to Edward Gibbon, who owed all of his knowledge to two Christian chroniclers—with very different views about the celebrated female scholar—who described the episode in the fifth and seventh centuries. Gibbon drew on the sources to provide a memorable description of the hacking to death of Hypatia. “On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent,” he recounts, “Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.”1 Peter was a minor cleric and rabble-rouser who, like many Christians, considered Hypatia’s intellectual reputation especially scandalous because she was a woman.*1 A recent biographer describes her as a woman who stood for “intellectual values, rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life.”2 She probably received students at home, although legend says she also taught amid the ruins of the Library of Alexandria, which had been ravaged so many times in previous centuries (beginning in 48 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar set the Alexandrian fleet on fire in the harbor and the flames spread to the library). The remains of the building and its manuscripts were finally destroyed by Christians in the last decade of the fourth century, when Hypatia would have been in her thirties or forties. The fate of Hypatia, in what had long been one of the most cosmopolitan and cultivated cities of the ancient world, is in a sense a coda to a thirty-year period bracketing the turn of the century, during which the Catholic Church joined with Christian rulers to suppress paganism and other religions, most notably Judaism. These religions had been allowed to operate freely within the purview of Rome as long as they mounted no direct challenge to imperial rule. The church also enlisted the support of the state in fighting numerous heresies within its ranks; only the Roman church was recognized as the form of Christianity deserving of imperial privilege in the West.

  The Christian narrative of this period is quite different. It skips over the decades when temples were razed, books of pagan philosophy burned, and pagan citizens threatened physically and financially if they refused to convert. Instead, the church’s version of history jumps forward and emphasizes the role of Roman Catholicism in preserving the remains of classical culture during the medieval era, both in the Vatican and in monasteries throughout Europe. The church’s own actions, in encouraging the devastation of repositories of Greco-Roman culture by fanatical Catholic mobs, are largely ignored. Where would the written remnants of pagan culture be safer from barbarous Christians than in the fortresses of religion itself—in protected, elite ecclesiastical settings where Christianity’s enemies would have no access to the classics? In its boastfulness about preserving pagan manuscripts, the church resembles the proverbial child who kills his parents and begs the court for mercy on grounds that he is an orphan. As Charles Freeman observes in The Closing of the Western Mind, “The historian is indeed deeply indebted to the monks, the Byzantine civil servants and the Arab philosophers who preserved ancient texts, but the recording of earlier authorities is not the same as maintaining a tradition of rational thought.”3

  By the opening decade of the fifth century, the once-invincible, increasingly shaky Roman Empire in the West had not yet become a monist Christian world. Not quite yet. The system by which historical events were assigned to the period B.C. or A.D., for example, as defined by the mythical date of the birth of Christ, was not even in use.*2 But as the chain of events in Alexandria demonstrates, the shift from paganism to Christendom was already well under way, as was the unholy or holy (depending on one’s perspective) alliance between church and state. This was most
evident in the urban centers of the empire, where Jews, Christians, and pagans, worshipping many deities, clashed as the ability of Roman civil authority to hold various religions in balance receded. Here the iconographic spiritual intellectuals like Augustine operated within a context of political power and turmoil that often applied strong economic pressure, with or without violence, to people who wanted to be on the right side of the new state religion.

  The unpunished death of Hypatia occurred at a time when not only was it economically advantageous to be a Christian in urban areas but when many wealthy Romans had embraced the faith and vastly enriched the church. One of Augustine’s letters recounts the story of Pinianus and Melania the Younger, a wealthy Roman couple who fled the onetime capital of the empire after it was sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410. The couple first stopped in Thagaste, Augustine’s native city, where his friend Alypius (who is discussed extensively in Confessions) was bishop. After Pinianus and Melania gave generously to adorn what had once been a modest church in Thagaste, Alypius took them to visit his old friend Augustine in the larger city of Hippo. The laymen of Augustine’s congregation crowded around the couple and demanded then and there that Pinianus be made a priest of the Hippo church. This conscription of laymen into the priesthood was increasingly common, especially if there was profit for the church in the clerical draft. (Marriage for priests was then a gray zone, but married men who entered the priesthood were almost always permitted to keep their wives.) Augustine said frankly that the purpose was “so as to retain among them a man of wealth who was known to despise money and give it away freely.”4 Such men and women gave most freely of all to the other Christians and Christian institutions, and the largesse from wealthy Christians strengthened the church in every city in its attempts to impose its religious agenda on once-secular Roman officials. The embrace of Jesus is viewed and portrayed by the church as an inevitable, supernaturally driven victory. And though there is no denying the spiritual power of the message proclaimed by the Jesus of the Gospels, there is also no denying that many Catholic authorities, especially as they gained political influence, used their new power to punish those who were not persuaded by the stories of the carpenter from Nazareth who rose from the dead. The shakiness of imperial authority provided opportunities for all proselytizers promoting different ways of life and faith, but only the Catholic Church, thanks to a unique confluence of its organizational strengths and the empire’s weaknesses, managed to take full advantage of the anxieties of the era.

  •

  At the beginning of the transitional fourth century, almost no one would have predicted the triumph of Christianity in spite of the growing strength and visibility of Christians throughout the empire. The Emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305, inaugurated what would become the century of Christianity’s ascendancy with a persecution of Christians that would come to occupy a mythological place in the history of the church. This era is worth revisiting, because Diocletian’s moves against the church provided an organizing myth and memory that helped Christianity gain vast numbers of new converts later in the century. The emperor known today mainly for his hounding of Christians is recognized by most historians as the great administrative, economic, and military reformer of the late empire. By reorganizing the empire into a tetrarchy under four leaders (he was definitely first among nonequals), Diocletian was able to reinforce the borders so vulnerable to barbarian invasion, and to organize new systems of taxation. Historical apologists for Christianity, as distinct from historians of Christianity, are interested almost exclusively in Diocletian’s antipathy to their faith.

  A century earlier, all inhabitants of the empire (except slaves) had been made Roman citizens. Diocletian expanded the concept, “stressing that a common citizenship meant accepting common responsibility for the state, and so those whose allegiances were questionable suddenly found themselves more vulnerable.”5 Freeman observes that the Roman state had always regarded Christians with some degree of concern, even when they were not being persecuted, because they “posed the classic political dilemma: how far can one show tolerance to a group that itself condemns the tolerance of the state in allowing pagan worship to continue?”6

  By the beginning of the fourth century, Diocletian was convinced that a large, well-organized community—and the church was already structured on a disciplined, hierarchical basis—did pose a threat to a centralized state that wished all citizens to accept equal responsibility for the common welfare (and pay equal taxes). The emperor’s first action against the Christians focused on property, and the way his targeted enemies responded would lead to a permanent schism within Christianity. In 303, the emperor demanded that Christian congregations turn over their holdings—buildings, books and scriptures, valuable sacred vessels, and liturgical cloths—to the state. Some bishops told their communicants to give up their property; the Donatist clerics (especially in North Africa) not only refused to turn over the church holdings but condemned other congregations for doing so.

  The Donatists’ condemnation of other Christians—since the “others” ultimately won out—created the permanent schism that began in the fourth century. In Augustine’s time, the Donatists considered themselves, not those affiliated with the Church of Rome, the “real” Christians—because no true Christian could have submitted to the state by giving up sacred writings and objects.

  It is certainly true that resistance from some Christians had strengthened Diocletian’s resolve to punish all Christians for their faith. Learning that some congregations had refused to give up their property, Diocletian issued a new decree that priests and bishops be imprisoned not only until they turned over the church’s holdings but also until they made official sacrifice to pagan gods. In April 304, the death penalty was decreed for all Christians, clergy or lay, who refused to sacrifice. Ironically, the refusal of the Donatists to give up church property fueled the persecutions that would remain foundational to the Christian exegesis of history long after the Donatists had been rejected by Roman Catholicism and dismissed as schismatics.

  Exactly how many Christians died in these persecutions is impossible to determine. Estimates based on the few contemporary sources range from a low of three thousand to a high of twenty thousand, and all depend on unverifiable statistics measuring the Christian population at the time. Historians agree that such estimates are inherently unreliable, if only because the religious landscape was shifting rapidly and Roman citizens in late antiquity had good reason, at various times, not to reveal their true beliefs. Also, Christians were more numerous in cities—and ancient census-takers (like modern demographers) could not keep up with immigration from the countryside into urban areas.

  Even while Diocletian still ruled as emperor, the other members of the tetrarchy varied greatly in their interpretation of the edicts regarding religion. Galerius, appointed by Diocletian to govern the Danube regions, rounded up, tortured, and executed Christians en masse. Constantius, another member of the tetrarchy (and the father of Constantine the Great), is said to have avoided both torture and death sentences. Some local pagan governors permitted Christians to acknowledge only the existence of a supreme being, without specifying whether that being was Zeus, Jesus, or the Holy Trinity.*3 Diocletian’s persecution, and the more brutal follow-up by Galerius, was no exception to the rule that attacks on Christians were sporadic and did not outlast the ruler himself. When Galerius died in 311, the pressure on Christians eased almost immediately. Christians viewed Galerius’s death as a demonstration of well-deserved divine vengeance. Lactantius, a Christian writer, exulted over the horrendous suffering of Galerius before his death, describing the illness in excruciating detail: “His bowels came out, his whole anus putrefied….The stench filled not just the palace but the whole city….His body, in intolerable tortures, dissolved into one mass of corruption.”7

  Because the roundups and executions that began under Diocletian came to such a swift end with Galerius’s death, they strengthened Christianity
in the short run as well as the long run by providing a powerful example of the faith for potential converts longing for a moral life that made more demands and provided more spiritual rewards than paganism.

  The story of Diocletian’s persecution has become a sustaining myth of official Catholicism in a fashion that resembles the place of American nineteenth-century persecution of Mormons in the official history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Catholics educated in parochial schools in the twentieth century were immersed in the martyrology of the Diocletian era. (Apart from Augustus, whose census sent Mary and Joseph off to Bethlehem to be counted, and Nero, I believe that Diocletian was the only Roman emperor whose name I learned in Catholic school.) We schoolchildren, tainted as we were with original sin, took a ghoulish pleasure in the stories of exotic torture on behalf of the faith. After the apostle Peter (crucified upside down because he told his Roman tormentors that he was unworthy to die as his savior had), Paul (beheaded because, as a Roman citizen, he was entitled to a more dignified end than crucifixion), and Nero, who set Rome afire and blamed Christians, the nuns turned to the martyrs of Diocletian’s era to praise and define the bravery of the early Christians.