Some scholars have suggested that these theological disputes were essentially political. The historian Erik Peterson points out that many Christians associated God the Father with the emperor, Jesus Christ with the bishops, and the holy spirit with “the people.” Thus, he suggests, Athanasius’s claim that the Son is entirely equal with the Father implies that the bishops’ authority is equal to that of the emperor himself. Peterson says that this position correlates with Athanasius’s refusal to take orders from any emperor, and pervaded the power struggles that characterized the relationship between emperors and bishops in the West throughout the middle ages. Conversely, he says, Arius’s formulation, which acknowledges the Father’s priority over the Son, survived for centuries in altered form in some of the Eastern churches, which tended to accept imperial power over church affairs, and later would influence the structure of what became “state churches.”91 Whether or not we accept this analysis, we can see that during the decades after the council intense conflict broke out between those who rallied behind Athanasius’s position and those who sided with Arius—conflict that engulfed Constantine’s sons and grandsons when they succeeded him as emperor and divided bishops and congregations throughout the empire.
As a result, for the next forty years, Athanasius’s own position, challenged by those he called Arian Christians—or, as he liked to say, Ariomaniacs—was by no means secure. Although Constantine initially supported Athanasius as Alexander’s successor, seven years later he took the side of his opponents and ratified the decision of a council of bishops to depose Athanasius. Forced into exile, Athanasius returned after Constantine’s death in 337 to reclaim his position, but two years later he was again deposed by a council of bishops and hid out among his supporters while Bishop Gregory from Cappadocia took over as bishop. Nearly ten years later, when Gregory died, Athanasius returned and reclaimed his office for three more years; but in 349 he was again deposed and replaced by another bishop from Cappadocia. After his third successful rival, having presided as bishop of Alexandria for five years, was lynched in 361, Athanasius succeeded in regaining his position, which he held tenaciously until his death in 373.
Despite such opposition—and perhaps because of it—Athanasius resolved to bring all Egyptian Christians, however diverse, under the supervision of his office. After working to gain the support of ascetic women,92 he began the more difficult task of establishing his authority over various groups of monks and “holy men,” including those who lived in communal monasteries that Pachomius, a former soldier turned monk, had founded throughout Egypt since the legalization of Christianity.93 In the spring of 367, when Athanasius was in his sixties and more securely established as bishop, he wrote what became his most famous letter. In a world much different from that of Irenaeus, Athanasius included in his annual Easter Letter detailed instructions that would extend and implement the guidelines his predecessor had sketched out nearly two hundred years before. First, he said, since heretics have tried to set in order for themselves the so-called apocryphal books and to mix these with the divinely inspired Scripture . . . which those who were eyewitnesses and helpers of the Word handed down to our ancestors, it seemed good to me . . . to set forth in order the canonized and transmitted writings . . . believed to be divine books.94
After listing the twenty-two books that he says are “believed to be the Old Testament,” Athanasius proceeds to offer the earliest known list of the twenty-seven books he calls the “books of the New Testament,” beginning with “the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” and proceeding to the same list of writings attributed to apostles that constitute the New Testament today. Praising these as the “springs of salvation,” he calls upon Christians during this Lenten season to “cleanse the church from every defilement” and to reject “the apocryphal books,” which are “filled with myths, empty, and polluted”—books that, he warns, incite conflict and lead people astray. It is likely that one or more of the monks who heard his letter read at their monastery near the town of Nag Hammadi decided to defy Athanasius’s order and removed more than fifty books from the monastery library, hid them in a jar to preserve them, and buried them near the cliff where Mu.hammad ‘Al¯ž would find them sixteen hundred years later.
Although Athanasius intended the “canon of truth,” now enshrined in the Nicene Creed, to safeguard “orthodox” interpretation of Scripture, his experience of Christians who disagreed with him showed that these “heretics” could still read the “canonical Scriptures” in ways he considered unorthodox. To prevent such readings, he insists that anyone who reads the Scriptures must do so through dianoia—the capacity to discern the meaning or intention implicit in each text. Above all, he warns believers to shun epinoia.95 What others revere as spiritual intuition Athanasius declares is a deceptive, all-too-human capacity to think subjectively, according to one’s preconceptions. Epinoia leads only to error—a view that the “catholic church” endorsed then and holds to this day.
Finally, lest anyone seek direct access to God through the “image of God” formed within us in creation, Athanasius took care to block this path as well. In his famous and rhetorically powerful work On the Incarnation of the Word, he explains that, although God originally created Adam in his own image, human sin has damaged that image beyond human capacity to repair (a view that Augustine later developed into his understanding of “original sin”). Consequently, there is now only one single being who embodies the divine image, and that is the Word of God himself, Jesus Christ:
Since humankind made in God’s image was disappearing, . . . what is the use of humankind originally having been made in God’s image? . . . No one else could re-create the likeness of God’s image for human beings except [Jesus Christ], the Image of the Father.96
While Arius urged believers to emulate Christ, Athanasius declares this effort not only difficult but impossible, even blasphemous: on the contrary, he famously proclaims, “God became human so that humankind might become divine.” All that a human being can do—must do—is believe and receive the salvation that God alone can offer. Thus Athanasius extended what Irenaeus taught: whoever seeks access to God must first have recourse to the Word, whom the believer approaches initially through baptism, by confessing the orthodox faith as contained in the statements of the creed, and by receiving the sacraments—the “medicine of immortality” offered wherever orthodox Christians worship together in church.
Even as a persecuted movement, Christianity had become increasingly visible in cities throughout the empire. During the third and early fourth century, some groups even built their own churches, as the number of converts more than doubled or tripled.97 Many, no doubt, were persuaded of the truth of Christian faith by the miraculous events that followed Constantine’s conversion. No wonder, then, that after 313 many more crowded the churches, not only those seeking some advantage by joining what would become the emperor’s church but also, no doubt, others who, although attracted to Christianity, previously had hesitated to receive baptism lest they place themselves and their families in danger. What such converts wanted was not only to share in the promise of divine salvation and eternal life in the next world but also, in this one, to join the “particular Christian society” committed to living according to Christ’s precepts—or, at least, according to modified versions of them. Many found in what earlier was a radical alternative to the Roman order a vision of transformed human relationships that now promised to embrace not only home and church but the whole of human society.
This sketch of what happened during the fourth century does not support the simplistic view often expressed by historians in the past—namely, that catholic Christianity prevailed only because it received imperial patronage, or that people participated because their leaders somehow succeeded in coercing them.98 Several historians have persuasively argued instead that Constantine’s decision to affiliate himself with the Christian churches demonstrates the enormous appeal that the Christian movement had held for an increa
sing numbers of converts long before it was safe to join.99 Nor does this sketch support the view that Constantine simply used Christianity for cynical purposes. We do not know his motives, but his actions suggest that he believed he had found in Christ an all-powerful divine patron and the promise of eternal life; and during the thirty years he ruled after that, he legislated, to the extent he considered practical, the moral values he found in biblical sources—the vision of a harmonious society, built upon divine justice, that shows concern even for its poorest members.
Although Constantine’s revolution lent support to the claims of catholic bishops that their church, triumphant through God’s grace, alone offered salvation, we would be naÏve to suppose that Christianity now became, in fact, uniform and homogeneous. Even a glance at the controversies and challenges of the fourth and fifth centuries shows that it did not.100 What this revolution did accomplish was to enhance the authority of the bishops identified as catholic and to establish their consensus, expressed through the statements of the creed, as defining the boundaries of the newly legitimate faith. To this day, someone who asks, “Are you a Christian?” is likely to follow with questions about propositional beliefs: “Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that Jesus Christ came down from heaven to save you from sin?”
The framework of canon, creed, and ecclesiastical hierarchy that Irenaeus and others began to forge in the crucible of persecution and that his successors like Athanasius worked to construct after Constantine’s conversion now gained enormous appeal. The “universal” church could invite potential converts to join an assembly that not only claimed to possess certain truth and to offer eternal salvation but had also become socially acceptable, even politically advantageous. Furthermore, the structure of Christian orthodoxy has proven remarkably durable and adaptable through two millennia and is developing new forms even today throughout the world, in areas notably including Africa, North and South America, South Korea, and China.
Scholars who investigate the origins of Christianity now see, however, that the landscape we are exploring has opened up unexpected vistas. The Nag Hammadi discoveries and sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with the work of many historians today, are opening up not only Christianity as we knew it but much that lay beyond its boundaries—as we used to define them.
The events sketched here obviously affect the way we understand our cultural history. But for those of us who find ourselves implicated in this history, as I do, untangling some of its complex strands has practical consequences as well as intellectual ones. In my own case, the hardest—and the most exciting—thing about research into Christian beginnings has been to unlearn what I thought I knew, and to shed presuppositions I had taken for granted.
This research offers new ways to relate to religious tradition. Orthodox doctrines of God—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—tend to emphasize the separation between what is divine and what is human: in the words of the scholar of religion Rudolph Otto, God is “wholly other” than humankind. Since those who accept such views often assume that divine revelation is diametrically opposed to human perception, they often rule out what mystically inclined Jews and Christians have always done—seeking to discern spiritual truth experienced as revelation, truth that may come from intuition, reflection, or creative imagination. Christian leaders who deny that such experience can teach us anything about God have often identified themselves as guardians of an unchanging tradition, whose “faithfulness” consists in handing down only what they received from ancient witnesses, neither adding nor subtracting anything. And while church leaders believe that this view of their role expresses appropriate humility, some also understand that it invests them, as guardians of divine truth, with God’s own authority.
Such leaders could not, of course, ban the imagination entirely—nor was this their intention. But they effectively channeled the religious imagination of most Christians to express—and to support—what they already taught. The two-thousand-year legacy of Christian music, art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and theology is, of course, enormously rich, and our culture is inconceivable apart from Christian tradition.
But those who see Christianity as offering, in Irenaeus’s words, a “very complete system of doctrines” that contain “certain truth” often have difficulty acknowledging—much less welcoming—diverse viewpoints, which, nevertheless, abound. Anyone who stands within the Roman Catholic communion, for example, knows that it embraces members who differ on topics ranging from doctrine to discipline, and the same applies, of course, to virtually every other Christian denomination. But since Christians often adopt Irenaeus’s view of controversy, many tend to assume that only one side can speak the truth, while others speak only lies—or evil. Many still insist that only their church, whether Roman Catholic or Baptist, Lutheran or Greek Orthodox, Pentecostalist or Presbyterian, Jehovah’s Witness or Christian Scientist—or only the group within their church with which they agree—actually remains faithful to Jesus’ teaching. Furthermore, since Christian tradition teaches that Jesus fully revealed God two thousand years ago, innovators from Francis of Assisi to Martin Luther, from George Fox and John Wesley to contemporary feminist and liberation theologians, often have disguised innovation—sometimes even from themselves—by claiming that they are not introducing anything new but only clarifying what Jesus actually meant all along.
Necessary as it seemed to Irenaeus in the second century to expel Valentinus’s disciples as “heretics,” doing so not only impoverished the churches that remained but also impoverished those he expelled. Uprooted from their original home within Christian churches, those stigmatized as “heretics” often wandered alone—despite the fact that the spiritual inquiry that engaged them found in Judaism and Christianity not only communities of origin but also primary sources of inspiration.
What such people seek, however, is often not a different “system of doctrines” so much as insights or intimations of the divine that validate themselves in experience—what we might call hints and glimpses offered by the luminous epinoia. Some engaged on such a path pursue it in solitude; others also participate in various forms of worship, prayer, and action. Engaging in such a process requires, of course, faith. The Greek term for faith is the same one often interpreted simply as belief, since faith often includes belief, but it involves much more: the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love.101 We noted how Tertullian ridiculed those who saw themselves more as seekers than as believers, “Since they are willing to say—and even sincerely— . . . ‘This is not so,’ and ‘I take this to mean something different,’ and ‘I do not accept that.’ ”102 Despite his inference that those who make such discriminations are either foolish or arrogant, it is not only “heretics” who choose which elements of tradition to accept and practice and which to reject. The sociologist Peter Berger points out that everyone who participates in such tradition today chooses among elements of tradition; for, like Judaism and other ancient traditions, Christianity has survived for thousands of years as each generation relives, reinvents, and transforms what it received.103
This act of choice—which the term heresy originally meant—leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: How can we tell truth from lies? What is genuine, and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows that there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Orthodoxy tends to distrust our capacity to make such discriminations and insists on making them for us. Given the notorious human capacity for self-deception, we can, to an extent, thank the church for this. Many of us, wishing to be spared hard work, gladly accept what tradition teaches.
But the fact that we have no simple answer does not mean that we can evade the question. We have also seen the hazards—even terrible harm—that sometimes result from unquestioning
acceptance of religious authority. Most of us, sooner or later, find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists. What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions—and the communities that sustain them—is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery. Thus they encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to “seek, and you shall find.”104
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: FROM THE FEAST OF AGAPE TO THE NICENE CREED
1. I Corinthians 15:3–4.
2. So Adolf von Harnack reconstructed the origin of such statements; see History of Dogma, volume I, 5–6, and II, 1–2, in Neil Buchanan’s translation from the 1900 edition of Dogmengeschichte (New York, 1961), volume I, 267–313, and II, 1–29.
3. Irenaeus, Libros Quinque Adversus Haereses 2.32.4, ed. W. W. Harvey (Cambridge, 1851), hereafter cited as AH.
4. Tertullian, Apology 39.
5. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, 1996), especially 73–94.
6. From Galen’s (lost) summary of Plato’s Republic, preserved in Arabic and translated by R. Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians (London, 1949), 15.
Beyond Belief Page 16