by Susan Jacoby
Whether the Christian story would have unfolded differently, and less successfully, had Julian, like Constantine, exercised imperial power for a quarter-century is one of the unanswered and unanswerable questions of religious history. It seems unlikely that the Christianity would have died out, even if paganism had been restored as the official state religion. After all, Christianity and all of its “heretical” offshoots emerged when paganism was the official religion of the empire (however loosely interpreted). By the time of Julian’s short rule, not only were there many more Christians throughout the empire—most of them converts from paganism, not Judaism—but the church possessed greater financial resources than it had just a half-century earlier. There is no reason to think that the faith would not have survived and constructed new martyrological myths if Julian had enjoyed a long reign, just as it had survived Diocletian’s persecution. The only thing that can be said with some degree of certainty is that if Julian had been an effective ruler for decades, it would have taken much longer for Christianity to exert power over the state—and the nature of that power might have been more limited and therefore less devastating to those who did not share Christian beliefs.
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The ascendancy of the church over secular authority accelerated in 379, when Theodosius I became emperor in the East. Theodosius ruled until 395, and the years of his tenure were characterized by even more serious economic troubles for the lower classes and even greater wealth for the upper-middle class. A number of important bishops, like Augustine, were themselves products of the new upper-middle class and depended on access to new money to finance their evangelical activities. More converts brought more money into the church coffers, and more money was required in order to reach out and attract more converts. The Catholic Church had much more appeal than ascetic sects (pagan or Christian) for the new bourgeoisie. If you were a wealthy exporter of, say, textiles in 390, would you join and give your money to a sect like the Manichees, who saw the flesh as evil (not a good marketing strategy for encouraging people to buy more cloth to drape around their bodies), or to an organized church that, even though it preached the gospel of eternal life, did not reject the comforts of this life? And if you were a displaced farmer who had not found a decent job in a city, would you seek solace from gods who promised nothing better in the future, or from a group that had the money to feed the poor even as it held out the promise of better things in the next world?
When Theodosius’s rule began, the seat of empire was Milan, where Augustine’s future mentor Ambrose presided as bishop (though years would elapse before the two future fathers of the church would meet). Meanwhile, Theodosius curried favor with church officials and well-off Christians and engaged in many conflicts with Ambrose over imperial versus church authority. In 388, Christians in Callinicus, a theretofore little-noticed town on the Euphrates River, destroyed a synagogue in what was to become a familiar theme. They were led by the bishop of the city—a once-unthinkable action that would soon become commonplace. They also torched a Gnostic house of worship, even though the Gnostics (who, like the Manichees, thought matter was generally evil) had just given in, under pressure from Theodosius, and pledged to practice the mainstream Christianity emanating from Italy. Theodosius, still under the illusion that his imperial authority trumped the church’s power, ordered the offending Christians to rebuild both the synagogue and the Gnostic chapel—a common move by emperors when religious violence threatened civil order. Ambrose bluntly challenged Theodosius and declared any synagogue “a haunt of infidels, a home of the impious, a hiding place of madmen, under the damnation of God Himself.”13 Theodosius yielded, for what would not be the last time, to the implacable bishop.
In 390, another dispute between Theodosius and Ambrose had a similar outcome. In Thessalonika, a port on the Aegean in Greece and one of the earliest centers of the spread of Christianity, a civilian riot over taxes led to the death of a Roman garrison commander.*4 From Milan, Theodosius ordered military retaliation against the tax rebels, and thousands of civilians were said to have been killed. As news of the massacre filtered back to Milan, Ambrose threatened to refuse communion to Theodosius (many of the dead were Christians), and the Christian emperor was obliged to engage in damage control by humbling himself before the Christian community in Milan. Theodosius then took a step that would influence church-state relations for centuries: he volunteered to do penance publicly in Milan’s Basilica Ambrosiana and seek absolution from Ambrose himself. As his surviving letters make clear, Ambrose viewed the penance as the emperor’s acknowledgment of the church’s authority over government. And the bishop was able to exact a significant price for having publicly rehabilitated Theodosius. Within weeks of the ceremony in the basilica, Theodosius gave his approval to laws banning, for the first time, all worship at pagan shrines. Throughout the empire, Christians soon began attacking and destroying shrines and cultural institutions with pagan associations.
The fallout from Thessalonika had a major impact in Alexandria, that longtime jewel of ancient culture. A mob destroyed the Serapeum, the city’s oldest and most revered shrine. In 391, Jewish and pagan manuscripts were torched in what remained of the Great Library of Alexandria. After the destruction of the entire temple and its contents, it was said that the bishop of Alexandria had saved one image, “lest people should afterward deny that their forefathers had ever been so foolish as to worship such things. Some say that the image was a figure of Jupiter, the chief of the heathen gods; others say that it was the figure of a monkey, for even monkeys were worshipped by the Egyptians!” One of the greatest delights of the Christian attackers (second only to the destruction of ancient manuscripts) was identifying and breaking a wooden statue of the god Serapis and making the unsurprising discovery that the wood was infected with bugs and rodents. “The Egyptians’ god had become an apartment block for mice,” boasted the early Christian historian Theodoret (c. 393–c. 457), “…the head they dragged through the whole city, so that his worshippers could see the impotence of the gods they had prayed to.”14
From Milan, Theodosius issued formal congratulations to the Alexandrian Christians for their actions as defenders of their faith. Such kindhearted Christian efforts paved the way for the events of 415, which included the murder of Hypatia as well as the expulsion of unconverted Jews from Alexandria. This was not the first time the large and prosperous Jewish community of Alexandria had been attacked by the locals; it was the first time they had done it with a “bravo” from the emperor.
In the year 38, before Christianity existed as a religion, Alexandrian Jews, who had aided the Romans in their imperial administration of Egypt, were tortured and murdered in what has sometimes been termed the first real pogrom in Jewish history. Benzion Netanyahu cites this explosion in support of his rejection of Christianity as the main factor in Western anti-Semitism. He describes the violence in Alexandria as “the first manifestation of antisemitism in its fullest form. It originated in circumstances peculiar to Egypt in both the Greek and early Roman period. These were (a) the reliance of Jews for their protection and security on the country’s rulers, who were mostly foreign; (b) the occasional assistance the Jews offered the rulers against the wishes of the non-Jewish population; (c) the stubborn insistence of the Jewish minority on equality of rights with the country’s upper classes; (d) the rise of some Jews to high social levels; and (e) the projection by the Jews of a religious victory over the pagan cults and beliefs. These were the factors that set ablaze the Greek world with Jew hatred.”15 What Netanyahu ignores in his description of this pre-Christian pogrom was that the Roman authorities made a determined effort to bring the violence under control and eventually succeeded. Terrible as the assault had been, the Jews did not leave Alexandria, and their community grew larger and wealthier during the next century. There was no repetition of anti-Semitic atrocities on any large scale in the ancient city for several centuries—until the Christian Church and the state joined in their determination either to con
vert all Jews or to get rid of them by one means or another.
Theodosius was the key figure, even more significant than Constantine, in forging a working relationship between church and empire in opposition to all non-Catholic faiths. The sanitization—actually, a near canonization—of Theodosius, symbolizing that the church now possessed the right to legitimize the rulers of the state, was embodied in Ambrose’s funeral oration for the emperor in 395:
Relieved therefore of the doubt of conflicts, Theodosius of worshipful memory now enjoys everlasting light and eternal tranquility, and for the deeds which he performed in this body, he is recompensed with fruits of divine reward. And it is because Theodosius of worshipful memory loved the Lord his God, that he deserved the company of saints.16
The instigator of the massacre at Thessalonika was thus transformed into a meritorious resident of heaven. As for the once-secular authority of the empire, neither religious minorities nor the pagans who still constituted a majority could ever again count on imperial officials, as they had in the past, to crack down on those who used violence to stop others from practicing their religion.
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When Christian mobs destroyed the Serapeum, Hypatia was a respected scholar and teacher. Theodosius’s embrace of force to stamp out both non-Christian culture and non-Christian religion, including his official congratulations to the thugs who burned the non-Christian manuscripts, must have been a theretofore unimaginable blow to pagan intellectuals. Whatever her true age, Hypatia’s life and fate must be viewed against the background of the growing imperial preference for Christianity and disdain for the classical pagan culture in which she was raised. Hypatia’s father was the mathematician and astronomer Theon, best known for his surviving discourse on Euclid’s Elements. A letter from one student, Synesius, indicated that Hypatia had taught him how to design and build an astrolabe, a portable astronomical calculator used into the nineteenth century. According to the historian of mathematics Morris Kline, the murder of Hypatia symbolized “the end of the era of Greek mathematics.”17
Hypatia’s death had nothing to do with heightened tensions between Christians and Jews, but it had everything to do with a political atmosphere in which the church was determined to attain a position as the only state-sanctioned religion. Brown writes that Egyptian Christian monks “shocked educated opinion by lynching a noble Alexandrian lady, Hypatia.”18 Hypatia’s public slaughter, fueled by collective passions, did resemble a lynching, but she was much more than a “noble Alexandrian lady.” Her death underscores the falsehood of the myth that Christianity won out solely by changing free hearts and minds and conveying a spiritual truth that the majority of the Roman Empire’s subjects accepted naturally and voluntarily once they were exposed to the Gospels. Hypatia was not the victim of sudden mob passion; she was an exemplary victim of the hatred of non-Christians encouraged by the bishop of the city. Her brutal murder was an intellectual message delivered with the ultimate physicality.
There was no room for someone like Hypatia in a world where, only fifteen years earlier, an emperor had congratulated the Christian shock troops, known by the Greek word parabolani, for their destruction of early manuscripts. The parabolani did not arise as a spontaneous mob but were directly controlled by Bishop Cyril (that’s Saint Cyril in Catholic history). Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, who was a Christian but remained on good terms with both pagans and Jews, had asked Theodosius to limit the paramilitary force of Christian thugs to five hundred, but his request fell on deaf ears.
Orestes was also friendly with Hypatia, who corresponded extensively with both Christian and pagan intellectuals conversant with classical learning. Such relationships reflected the emergence of a new intellectual class dispersed in cities throughout the empire—the same group that would later provide an audience for Augustine’s Confessions. Brown characterizes the era as one in which “able men, less burdened by the prejudices of an aristocracy and eager to learn, maintained a tone of vigor and disquietude that distinguishes the intellectual climate of Late Antiquity from any other period of ancient history.”19 In their energy and originality, these intellectuals resembled the thinkers of every era in which ancient certitudes give way to the doubts and enthusiasms of a new kind of society. That the men were willing to share ideas with an accomplished woman was one measure of their departure from classical tradition. Had Hypatia not engaged in a wide correspondence during her lifetime, the Christian sources upon which Gibbon based his account would not have known who she was or cared about her fate.
This intellectual flowering began when Christianity and paganism were still in rough equipoise under the weakening rule of Rome. The exchanges between Hypatia and male scholars represent yet another road not taken, a collaboration that might have been had Christianity not insisted on its absolute truth claim. For a continuing dialogue of enlightened intellectuals to have emerged from the cultural tumult of late antiquity, Christianity would have to have been, and subsequently developed into, a very different religion. There could be no better example of the stifling of the promising multireligious intellectual discourse than two commentaries by Christian scholars on the death of Hypatia—one written in the fifth century, the other near the end of the seventh century. The fifth-century Byzantine Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus provided an account of Hypatia’s character and death that gave one of the last influential pagan intellectuals her due and deplored the manner of her death at the hands of Christians:
There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her more.
Yet even she fell victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from the carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril [the bishop] but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.20
This denunciation of “fierce and bigoted zeal” was still possible among Christian intellectuals in the fifth century. But in a blink of historical time, fair-minded commentary about a pagan philosopher would be unthinkable for a Christian historian. In the seventh century, John, the Coptic bishop of Nikiu, told a completely different story about Hypatia. In John’s view, Hypatia fully deserved what she got and had bewitched both the prefect Orestes and the Christian clerics with whom she corresponded about scientific matters. Of particular importance is the way in which John conflates Jews and pagans as enemies of the faith.*5
And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city [Orestes] honored her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom. And not only did he this, but he drew many believers to her, and he himself received the unbelievers at his house.
And on a certain day when they were making merry over a theatrical exhibition connected with dancers, the governor of the city published an edict regarding the public exhibitions in the city of Alexandria. Now Cyril [the bishop]…was eager to gain exact intelligence regarding this edict. And there was a man named Hierax, a Christian possessing understanding and intelligence who used to mock the pagans and was a devoted adherent of the orthodox Father the patriarch and was obedient to his admonitions….But when the Jews saw him in the theater they cried out and said: “This man has not come with any good purpose, but only to provoke an uproar.” And Orestes the prefect was displeased with the children of the holy church, and Hierax was seized and subjected to punishment publicly in the theater….And when [Cyril] heard this, he sent word to the Jews as follows: “Cease your hostilities against the Christians.”