Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The chronicle goes on to talk about clashes between Jews and Christians, ending when “the Christians expelled Jews from the city, and pillaged all their possessions and drove them forth wholly despoiled, and Orestes the prefect was unable to render them any help.” This attack on Jews was followed by the fatal attack on Hypatia. Bishop John exults in the fact that Hypatia was humiliated by being stripped and dragged through the streets of Alexandria before she died. The chronicle ends, “And all of the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him ‘the new Theophilus’; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.”21 And they lived happily ever after.

  John’s chronicle and its tone—including the use of the word “beguile”—remind us that Hypatia belongs as much to the history of feminism as to the history of the dominance sought by religions making absolute truth claims. Far from being a wily seductress, Hypatia did not marry and likely led a celibate life, in keeping with a variety of pagan and Christian sects and philosophies that embraced chastity at the time. What Christianity did not and could not embrace was chastity combined with a full intellectual life for a woman. Hypatia was a pagan ascetic to a fault, and she resembled the Emperor Julian in her contempt for the body—if even some of the legends handed down about her are to be believed. According to one story, she displayed a blood-soaked menstrual pad to discourage the attentions of one of her student-admirers. “That, young man, is what you have fallen in love with,” she reportedly said, “and there is nothing beautiful about that.”22 The suspicion that Hypatia and Orestes were sexually involved fueled the rumors that she was responsible for preventing Orestes and the fanatical Cyril from compromising their differences over the relationship between church and state.

  Respect for a female scholar was no higher among pagans and Jews than among Christians; the difference is that pagans and Jews did not take it upon themselves to kill Hypatia for being a woman who did not know her place. In 2009, the story of Hypatia was turned into a movie, Agora, examining Hypatia’s history as a Neoplatonist philosopher and astronomer. The Chilean-Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, amid the furor surrounding the release of the film in Europe (a controversy stoked largely by the Vatican), noted, “We are accustomed to seeing lions devouring Christians in films but not the transformation of Christians from a persecuted group to one that is powerful and armed.”23 In an effort to placate the Vatican, the film’s Italian distributor invited high-level Catholic clergy charged with responsibility for religious orthodoxy to the premiere but described the reaction of those who did attend as “all on edge.” Showings of Agora were canceled in Egypt, because the government feared attacks on its Coptic Christian minority, always a target for extreme Islamists in that country. (The fear that the film would instigate attacks is tragicomic, given that Islamic extremists today are every bit as opposed to science—and to learned women—as most fifth-century Christian theologians were to the influence of a female mathematician and philosopher.) However, the tense reaction of the Catholic Church to the movie offers a telling illustration of the investment that orthodox Catholicism still has in whitewashing its history regarding science and in presenting early Christians only as martyrs, not as persecutors who did everything possible to suppress learning that conflicted with church doctrine.

  The Vatican’s objections to a film depicting the ugly side of what Christians did to one female scholar more than seventeen hundred years ago is also motivated by the church’s insistence that intimidation played no role in the growth of Christianity. The story of Hypatia challenges the myth that conversions came about only because of divine grace, reasoned persuasion, or both—and not because anyone was forced or intimidated into accepting the faith by seeing a pagan scholar murdered, a synagogue torched, or non-Christians losing jobs to those who had openly accepted Christ as their savior.

  Not all of the church fathers initially agreed with tactics in which Christian violence against non-Christians was not only tolerated but, as in the case of Theodosius, supported by the state. Augustine had advised Christian government officials and church leaders to avoid combating heathenism by force. In a well-known sermon, Augustine preached, “We must first endeavour to break the idols in their hearts. When they themselves become Christians, they will either invite us to do the good work of destroying their idols, or they will be beforehand with us in doing so. And in the meanwhile, we must pray for them, not be angry with them.”24 This quote from Augustine appears today on a right-wing evangelical Christian Web site, accompanied by the assertion that “the wise teachers of the church knew that this would not be the right way of going to work, but that it would be more likely to make the heathens obstinate than to convert them.”25 The most conservative elements in both the Catholic and Protestant churches have adopted this line, because the idea of forced religious conversion is considered repellent today by most inhabitants of Western democracies.

  It is hardly surprising that physical force remains a charged subject today for historical religions whose spread was facilitated by the unified power of church and state. But the concept and the practical reality of force should not be defined as purely physical, and should not be limited to exemplary cases like Hypatia’s. Force is better defined as a state of mind, understandably shared by most people in societies where it is clear that official institutions, from the state to schools, allow no personal choice in matters of faith. It is entirely possible that many, perhaps the vast majority, of those living under this subtle yet all-powerful force sincerely adopt and adapt to the teachings of the approved religion and come to love them. We have no way of knowing, given that the only people who described their experience of conversion in the ancient world were the members of the rare minority of the literate. How did a pagan slave sold to a Christian master feel about the religious practices he would undoubtedly have to adopt? Slaves, before and after the spread of Christianity, were expected to follow the religion of their owners; this was a factor in early decrees preventing Jews from owning slaves. How did a pagan farmer feel when his region, and his tax obligations, came under the control of a Christian satrap? Perhaps, when a charismatic church leader like Augustine appeared on the scene in a city like Hippo, a religiously indifferent citizen was happy to join a new church that his neighbors had joined. We simply don’t know. The only certainty is that, within a generation or two, the majority, in societies that predated the invention of the printing press, forgot that there ever had been a choice. At the beginning of the fifth century, in both the Western and Eastern sectors of the failing Roman Empire, just enough coercion was being applied to speed up and eventually ensure the triumph of forgetting.

  * * *

  *1 Peter is, however, described by John, the Coptic bishop of Nikiu—one of Gibbon’s sources and hostile to Hypatia—as “a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ.”

  *2 Victor of Tennono, a seventh-century African chronicler, is believed to be the first historian who used the “A.D.” dating system. The English monk Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, is the first major, widely known historical work, beginning in the pre-Christian era with the Roman conquest of Britannia, to use the dating system based on the birth of Christ. This system was used in the West until the late twentieth century, when it was replaced, in many scholarly works, by the usage B.C.E. (“before the common era”) and C.E. The locution “common era,” of course, is a recognition that many peoples, including Jews, Muslims, and most Asians, do not consider the birth of Christ the most important event in history—if they consider it a historical event at all. Throughout this book, I have simply used the year for historical events after the beginning of the common era. Events before the common era are noted as B.C.E.

  *3 Of the Trinity, I will only say here that the issue of whether Jesus was God—in substance, the equal of God the Father—was not settled theologically until 381, after a long evolution of the Nicene Creed of 325. By the end of the fourth century, Christians who did not
believe that Jesus was God were deemed heretics—a cause in which the church was able to enlist the aid of imperial authority. Of the Holy Ghost, whom most lay Catholics have always found incomprehensible, the less said the better. This spirit, however, is also an equal part of the Trinity in Catholic theology. For those who did not have a Catholic education, one of the more lucid explanations of the evolution of this theology in the morning of Christendom appears in James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, pp. 189–92.

  *4 Thessalonika is now the second-largest city in Greece, after Athens.

  *5 The excerpts from Socrates Scholasticus and from the Chronicle of John, Coptic Bishop of Nikiu, were both originally written in Greek and have since been translated into English. Michael A. B. Deakin, an Australian historian of mathematics, provides a detailed history of these sources in a paper, “The Primary Sources for the Life and Work of Hypatia of Alexandria,” dated August 1995. The document is available on the Web by entering the title in a search engine. (Since Web addresses of academic papers frequently change, I do not wish to frustrate readers by supplying one that may be out of date.) Deakin, author of Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (2007), points out that subsequent accounts of the death of Hypatia are all clearly derived from Socrates Scholasticus’s account. They do not differ on the facts, as is clear from John’s later hostile commentary, but on the meaning of Hypatia’s death and its implications for Christianity.

  3

  COERCION, CONVERSION, AND HERESY

  THE FOURTH-CENTURY rise of Catholicism, in a world of shifting imperial policy toward religion, was entwined with a variety of heresies (as defined by Rome) that have never disappeared from philosophical and religious discourse. In the modern world, yesterday’s heretical cult often turns into today’s respected religion, but in the fourth and fifth centuries, the reverse was true.

  The average twenty-first-century American would laugh if the word “heresy” were used to describe the religious conversion of anyone close to her. If there are negative reactions, family heartburn is about as bad as it gets—although that can sometimes get pretty bad. Throughout most of history, however, social and family attitudes toward conversion depended mainly on whether the group in question was losing or gaining a believer. In the part of the world dominated by Christianity, intense feelings about religious conversion became integral to the bifurcated world of heresy and truth that emerged with the victory of Roman Catholicism, not only over paganism but over other forms of Christianity in the West. Only Judaism, because of its special historical and scriptural status as the predecessor of Christianity, stood outside the boundaries of this bifurcated theological universe.

  The enduring power of the concept of true and false religions, even in an America where few citizens use the word “heresy” in public, can be seen in the appropriation of the word “Christian” by the religious right in the United States. When an American says, “I am a Christian,” the declaration implies that those who disagree with the speaker’s religious tenets, on either theological or philosophical grounds, cannot be “real” Christians. In the ancient world, the battle over heresies within and between various Christian groups always revolved around the questions of who the real Christians were; what sort of conversion and public testimony was required for “false” Christians to be reconciled with the “true” Christian community; and, eventually, whether the acceptance of a particular form of Christianity lined up with the prevailing political authority.

  To muddy the religious landscape still further, heresies like Gnosticism included both Christian and non-Christian sects. It is often mistakenly thought that all Gnostics were Christians, largely because of the enormous attention paid in recent decades to the Gnostic gospels and their exclusion from the patristic canon. The only belief shared by all Gnostics was their vision of a world divided between spirit and matter. Manicheism, probably the largest of the Gnostic sects, drew heavily on Christian sources but was decidedly non-Christian. In retrospect, however, alternative versions of Christianity, professed by people who proudly proclaimed their reverence for Jesus, posed a more serious threat to the Roman church than any non-Christian heresy. Had the church not been able to suppress these dissenting Christian sects competing for and on the same turf, Catholicism would have looked more like Protestantism as it emerged from shards of the once-mighty empire.

  Furthermore, the proliferation of heresies—not in small, isolated cults but in genuine movements that attracted converts—posed a special threat to the Roman church in regions like North Africa, where Catholics allied with Rome were a minority for many centuries among those calling themselves Christians. The Rome-based church’s attempt, in concert with the state, to suppress dissenting Christians was accompanied by a change in attitudes on the part of many of Catholicism’s founding fathers—Augustine among them—about the legitimacy of force to obtain converts and to prevent Catholics from converting to other branches of Christianity. The Augustine who had once said that Christians should not smash pagan idols but should persuade pagans to want to do the smashing themselves slowly changed his mind about coercion and about what ought to be done about all non-Christian religions, as well as heresies within the church.

  Augustine initially thought that because Christianity represented a higher state of moral evolution than pre-Christian religions—including Judaism—there was no need for external pressure to spread the faith. Later in life, Augustine changed his mind and cited the punishments periodically visited upon the Israelites, God’s chosen before the birth of the Messiah, as evidence that men undisciplined by superior external forces could not be expected to choose good or truth freely. Those Christians who gave in to the temptations of curiosity or carnality—and who did not, in Augustine’s moral universe?—were no better than the ancient Israelites and must be made to obey God’s laws through punishment administered by the church, the state, or both. Augustine took this attitude toward all of the heresies of his day, as well as toward pagans and Jews. He rejected the death penalty for Christian—and only Christian—heretics because it precluded any possibility of repentance. By the early 400s, Augustine had come to the conclusion that “rarely, no never, does it happen that someone comes to us with the wish to become a Christian who has not been struck by some fear of God.”1 He even noted that Paul’s fall from the horse and his head injury were manifestations of divine force, without which Paul might never have embraced Christ. Augustine’s adoption of the “a good knock on the head will set you straight” school of religious conversion is particularly remarkable in view of his own slow, unforced, and circuitous route to Christianity.

  The words “heresy,” “infidelity,” and “apostasy” sound almost quaint today to liberal religious believers of many faiths as well as atheists—all of whom have been infected, according to the lights of traditional religion, by modernism. (In 1907, Pope Pius X declared in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis—“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”—that “modernism embraces every heresy.”) Conservative Islamists still use these words, especially “infidelity” and “infidel,” but most Christian bishops do not—at least in public. What American Catholic bishop, exchanging quips with a Mormon and a nonsectarian Protestant running for the American presidency and eating a sumptuous dinner memorializing Al Smith, would wish to turn to his dinner companions on the dais and call them heretics or infidels?*1 In the fourth and early fifth centuries, that is exactly what the fathers of the church did in public letters and sermons—and they were not obliged to have civic dinners with their religious enemies. But the church could never have waged such a vigorous fight against heresies, from without or within, had its leaders not benefited from the active help of the Roman state and its Christian emperors in the late fourth century.

  In 382, Theodosius I became the first emperor to pronounce religious heresy a capital offense against the state. There is no evidence that the ultimate punishment prescribed by this law was enforced in any systematic way, given that groups like t
he Manicheans continued to flourish, but the edict’s manifold provisions offered ample justification for a wide variety of lesser actions aimed at suppressing Christian, as well as non-Christian, sects abjured by the Roman church. “Heretical teachers were forbidden to propagate their doctrines publicly or privately,” reports the Catholic Encyclopedia; “to hold public disputations; to ordain bishops, presbyters, or any other clergy; to hold religious meetings; to build conventicles or to avail themselves of money bequeathed to them for that purpose.”*2 The law also permitted slaves who informed on heretical masters to buy their freedom by converting to Catholicism. The requirement of both conversion and money in exchange for freedom obviously calls the conventional spiritual narrative of conversion into question whenever and wherever slaves were concerned. We may not know how a pagan slave felt about having to follow his Christian owner’s religion, but we know what he could do about it if he thought he could prove heresy on the part of the owner. (This interesting route to freedom would never be open to American slaves.)

  •

  It has been said by a number of scholars that Christianity introduced heresy into a pagan world that had never possessed such a concept. I would amend that generalization to emphasize a more important point in the history of conversion: as Christianity consolidated its power, the church introduced the idea of individual religious heresy as a punishable offense and, on a collective scale, as a form of political treason. Absent punishment, heresy really has no meaning for heretics, apart from the knowledge that the majority religion rejects their ideas. Such knowledge—again, absent punishment—may be painful in some circumstances but a satisfying confirmation of superiority in others. Had Catholic bishops simply pointed fingers and yelled “heretic,” without the support of the state to penalize those nonconformists, we might be reading books filled with pages about the Roman Catholic Heresy.