China, Galileo, and the Heavens

Over recent decades, however, the Ministry of Rites had made a succession of embarrassing mistakes.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

The time was the early seventeenth century.  The place was China.  The mistakes had to do with keeping track of upcoming eclipses and the movements of the stars.  The work was a strict monopoly of the state, and like all such state monopolies, mistakes are certain.

An eclipse was upcoming.  It was decided that a contest would be held: who could best predict the proper time and date?  The barbarians who had recently arrived from the furthest West were the most accurate.  As their reward, they were commissioned by the emperor to reform the calendar.  Johann Schreck, a Jesuit priest and a polymath – expert in astronomy, mathematics, linguistics and a physician – was to lead this effort.

Besides their interest in the stars, these barbarians and their Chinese counterparts held something else in common: a Catholic baptism!  Three years’ travel from Rome, and separated by Muslim Turks and others, yet here they were.

China was not to be treated as Spain treated the inhabitants of the New World.  Too ancient, too powerful (not much has changed, it seems).  The Jesuits would live as they had in other lands – by adopting as many of the local customs as they could without offending their Catholic faith.

Confucius had been bestowed with the same divine gift of reason that came upon Aristotle; Confucianism could even lead one to Christ.  Or so thought Matteo Ricci, an Italian who arrived in China in 1582.  Of course, some of his superiors were not so convinced.

Haughtiness toward the poor, an “obscene” number of wives, and certainly not a hint of worship toward the One Creator God of Israel.  In fact, no real concept of creation or of a god.  Fire, water, earth, metal, wood: these were the constituent elements of a naturally occurring order.  Yin and yang would provide balance.

Schreck, less than a year after his appointment, would die.  Investigating an herb that was said to induce sweating, he made himself the subject of the clinical trial.  A few hours later, he was dead.  Yet he left the others with some of the most advanced equipment in the world for observing the heavens.

Before he died, Schreck explained to his Chinese colleagues of the most glorious mathematician the world knows: Galileo Galilei, who had improved upon a lens that enabled one to better see the stars.  Schreck had met him several years before.  His lens would be christened a ‘telescope.’

His discoveries delivered a blow to Aristotle’s model of the universe – for example, a pitted moon could no longer be considered unchanging and incorruptible.  Impatient for fame and contemptuous of Aristotle and his admirers – yet, with desires to climb the social ladder.  The celebrity that would be his if he could convince the leaders of the Church to exchange Aristotle for him.

Off to Rome, where he would convince many of the faults of Aristotle’s cosmology.  Some of the most eminent mathematicians – Jesuits – had corroborated Galileo’s claims.  One cardinal, Maffeo Barberini, would even praise him in verse.  And not a bad supporter, as he would later become Pope Urban VII.

Where Was Clarisse?

Clarisse: One more question.

Montag: Another one?

Clarisse: Just a little tiny one.

Montag: What is it?

Clarisse: Do you ever read the books you burn?

Montag: Why should I?

-          Fahrenheit 451

If only such a question was asked of a particular monk in Wittenberg about five-hundred years earlier….

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Had the two men been able to find a volume of Aquinas, they would have burnt that as well.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

December 1520.  Martin Luther had been given sixty days to recant.  He chose to use the time burning books, along with a colleague from the university, the theologian Johann Agricola.

I have covered this story often, the story of Luther and the Church and the Reformation which turned into a revolution.  In this post I will stick to bits and pieces that are new to me or that just strike my fancy.  For example, regarding the latter: Holland opens the chapter with this book burning, and I thought of the movie (no, I didn’t read the book…).

Further, to my Catholic friends: I know how you feel about Luther and the tearing apart of the Catholic Church that followed.  Yes, it was a blow to Western society and to the Church.  But, and to my Protestant friends: it was an inevitable blow.  There really were corruptions in plain sight – and Luther’s criticism regarding the practice of indulgences was perhaps the one most upsetting to and dangerous for the Church hierarchy.  To my Orthodox friends…I know, you are sitting, watching, with a gallon size tub of popcorn on your lap.

To all of you – just take it as history, as one of the most important events in Western history since the time of Christ.

In more than one place I have read that Luther really didn’t know much about Aquinas’ work.  If he could not find a volume to burn, it would seem he would not have had one handy to have read. 

He saw the then-current scholasticism that followed Aquinas, but this was something quite different.  In any case, whether Luther might have appreciated Aquinas had he read and understood him is now secondary.  He didn’t, and he hadn’t.

Luther did have a copy of the papal decree that condemned his teachings: “Because you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you.  Into the fire with you.”  Canons, papal decrees, and anything associated with Aquinas’ philosophy had to go.  Luther, who scorned the idea of thinking of himself as a lawyer, took for granted how much of the then-modern law owed to the work of those legal scholars whose books he so eagerly burned.

It really sounds no different than today, where enemies of Christianity take for granted that they are only able to speak freely against those in power due to Christianity, and only because they have access to Christian terms and concepts.  Had someone not a Roman citizen spoken so brazenly to a citizen in pre-Christian times, it would have been off with his head, no questions asked.

Luther had his students build a float, loaded with parodies of papal decrees.  After driving it around town to raucous cheers, he burnt the lot.  A man dressed as the pope tossed his tiara into the fire.  Luther was not a man given to understatement…or humility.  But then, perhaps it took this kind of man to stand up to the significant issues then practiced by and defended by the Church.

Apocalypse Then

 

A third of Christendom, it was estimated, had perished of the plague.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

We are now in the aftermath of this catastrophe.  It was not the only shock to Christendom, but it certainly also cannot be assumed to be separate from the other shocks.

The Byzantines, having finally freed themselves from the blow of the Crusaders in 1261, were facing the new threat of the Ottoman Turks.  Constantinople was in sight; even the defenses of Hungary were already probed.

And then there was the papal schism.  After a council of bishops declared both rival popes deposed in 1409 and then crowning a new candidate of their own, they ended up with not two popes, but three.  Scandal built upon scandal.  Instead of holding the keys to the kingdom, was the papacy, instead, an agent of hell?

John Wycliffe would denounce both factions in the schism as demonic, and stated that the papacy was lacking in divine foundation.  But it was in Prague where the most explosive reaction would be felt.  The resentment of wealth – especially the wealth of the monasteries; the reforms of Gregory VII, instead of redeeming the Church, sent it on a path of corruption; the papacy seduced by the power of earthly glory.

Only Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination.  And so it was, in the streets of Prague, that is had become a common thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John….

Jan Hus would serve as the lightning rod for this movement.  He attracted not only the peasants, but the Czech noblemen as well (being freed from the divided authority made possible by the Church was desired by many such nobles).  In 1414, in the imperial city of Constance, the heresy of Prague’s most celebrated preacher would be put on trial.

Hus would travel to Constance under safe conduct guaranteed by emperor-elect Sigismund.  Arriving on 3 November, he would be placed under arrest three weeks later then burned at the stake with his ashes dumped in the Rhine River.

These events did not calm the storm of the Hussite subversion.  In the wake of the execution, denunciations in Prague of the pope as Antichrist only increased, and were made openly.  Sigismund was not immune to denunciation – due to his treachery regarding the lack of safe conduct.

As an aside, I have read elsewhere the claim (excuse?) that the safe conduct was technically only offered for the journey to Constance – one-way.  Why Hus would have then taken the journey is difficult to fathom.

In 1419, conservatives attempted a crackdown in Prague.  It backfired.  Hussites stormed city hall, flinging their opponents out of its windows.  They seized control of churches throughout the city.  Through this, the Taborites, under the leadership of Jan Žižka, would launch a surprise attack on Sigismund, who was attempting to besiege Prague to submission.  Sigismund was forced to withdraw.  By 1424, all of Bohemia was brought under Žižka’s rule.

Female Blasphemy…and Glory

 

Maifreda had taught her followers that she was destined to rule all Christendom: that she would be elected pope.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

Things didn’t end so well for Maifreda.  She was burned at the stake.  Having followed in the footsteps of Guglielma, her fate was sealed when Guglielma’s past was revealed.

Guglielma, so it was reported a year after Maifreda’s execution, had come to the city ‘saying that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women; and she baptised women in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of herself.’

She taught a form of dispensational theology: from the Creation to the coming of Christ, it was the Age of the Father; from Christ until now, the mid-thirteenth century, it was the Age of the Son.  Now it was the Age of the Spirit, and whether sanctioned by her or not, Guglielma’s followers believed her to be the Spirit.  The Age of the Spirit was to be a feminine age.

After her death, Maifreda claimed to see Guglielma rise again.

A year after Maifreda’s execution, and twenty years after Guglielma’s death, the inquisitors took a crowbar to Guglielma’s tomb.  The corpse was removed, a great fire was lit.  The bones were burned to ashes and scattered.  Her tomb was smashed to pieces and her images were crushed underfoot.

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A nude female statue was discovered while digging the foundations of a house in Siena.  It turned out to be Venus, the goddess of love.  This ancient masterpiece was too beautiful to be left hidden.  It was taken to the city’s great central plaza and placed on top of a fountain.

At once, everything began to go wrong.

A financial crash; a rout of the Sienese army.  Five years later, the Great Dying – the plague – reached the city in 1348. It raged for months.  In the end, over half of Siena’s population had succumbed.

Yet, this was not the end of it.  An army of mercenaries extorted a massive bribe from the government; there followed a coup; the city’s nearest and bitterest rival, Florence, would inflict a massive military defeat.

“From the moment we found the statue, evils have been ceaseless.”  So said the leaders of the new governing council.  Its nudity was contrasted with everything that the Virgin Mary represented.

On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of Venus.  Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces.  Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence.

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Prostitutes offered to pay for one of the windows of the great cathedral of Notre Dame.  This offer was rejected by the leading theologians of the university in Paris.  Two decades later, in 1213, one of these same scholars ordered all women convicted of prostitution to be removed from the city.  In 1254, the king sought to banish them from all of France.  (Clearly, men such as these had no understanding of the laws of supply and demand).

Schooling Heretics

 

In 1179, a council convened by the pope specified ‘the lands around Albi and Toulouse’ as an especially noxious breeding ground of heresy.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

This wound which would not be healed with the treatment of a poultice must be cut away with a knife, according to Innocent III.  By November, 1207, it was feared that this heresy, left unchecked, would contaminate all Christian people.

In July, 1209, a great army of knights would have their crusade.  Not for territorial expansion; not for reclaiming lost Christian lands.  But for the extirpation of dangerous beliefs.  The crusaders would storm Béziers.  Reportedly, when asked by the crusaders how to distinguish the faithful from the heretics, the papal legate offered that they should kill them all and God will sort it out.

Even those sheltering in churches were slaughtered.  Fire brought down the cathedral; blood darkened the river.  “Divine vengeance raged marvelously,” reported the legate back to Rome.  In one afternoon, Béziers was reduced to a corpse-strewn wreckage.  But such slaughters would continue for two decades.  The terror grew even beyond the pope’s ability to contain it.  Ultimately, it was Pope Gregory who would sign a treaty bringing these slaughters to an end.

From the grandest schooling to the most acute…

The Count, entering her quarters, could only bless himself in admiration.  ‘Never before,’ he exclaimed, ‘has the daughter of a king been seen spinning wool.’

The count was Count Paviam; the daughter of the king was Lady Elizabeth.  Working in a hospital, tending the sick, bathing them, cleaning their sores.  Toiling in the kitchen, washing dishes, preparing vegetables.  If no other work was assigned, she would sit and spin wool.

Elizabeth was born to greatness, descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king.  At fourteen years old, she married Louis of Thuringia in central Germany.  She bore him three children; he gloried in her closeness to God.  Louis died, and instead of returning to her father’s court, she chose to live a despised life.

The time was the thirteenth century, and after the reformations of the eleventh century.  Revolutionary in many ways, but obviously not in favor of further revolution.  Clerks in service to the papal bureaucracy toiled to strengthen the foundation of the Church’s authority.

‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’

So proclaimed the First Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.  Obviously, the claim that the bishops and abbots present came ‘from every nation which is under heaven’ was a stretch.  Let alone the Church in the East, even within the West there were the elite born of the reformation, who held to demands of further reformation.

Bands of preachers, the Waldensians, roamed beyond the castle of Wartburg.  They would preach that one must give away his wealth.  Pleading with the pope to be allowed to teach, they had been laughed out of the papal court.  After all, one didn’t suffer a university education only to land in poverty.

…they lambasted the clergy for failing to practice what they preached: for being leprous with lechery, and pride, and greed. … they had come to despair of the very edifice of the Church. …Corruption was its entire fabric.

Responding with such vitriol, they would soon proclaim that only Christ was their bishop.  Such teachings were condemned as heresy, of course. 

Reconciling Contradictions

 

The charge, though, was customarily the same: the unworthy priests were disqualified from practising the rites and rituals of the Church; that they were polluted, tarnished, corrupted; that they were not truly Christians.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

The year was 1076.  Gerard, bishop of Cambrai, had concerns about where such charges could lead.  He summoned one Ramihrd, accused of “preaching many things outside the faith.”  But when questioned, his answers were quite orthodox.

Ramihrd then, in return, accused the bishop of being filthy with sin.  This was too much for the bishop’s supporters, who then bundled Ramihrd in a wooden hut and burned him alive.  Only fifty years earlier was the first heretic executed in the Latin West.

The bishop felt no cause to punish Ramihrd’s executioners.  However, early the next year a letter would arrive in Paris to the city’s archbishop.  It was a letter from the pope, reporting in shocked tones regarding the situation.  “We view it as something monstrous.”

Hildebrand, now Pope Gregory VII, had the ambition to cleanse the Church of every spot of filth.  The preceding years had seen pope after pope serving as a model of scandal.

Gregory…felt himself called to a mighty labour of cleaning.  The clergy were leprous.  Only he, the heir of Saint Peter, could bring them to purity.

How to clean up the clergy unless the pope had sole authority to make appointments?  The pope struggled with the king in this regard; thus began the Investiture Controversy.  In fact, when Ramihrd refused to acknowledge Gerard as priest, he had done so in direct obedience to a decree from Rome and this pope – the decree prohibiting the king’s right to confer bishoprics.

To whore after baubles, and estates, and offices, was to betray the King of Heaven. …Bishops were servants of God alone, or they were nothing.

The beginnings of a meaningful separation of Church and emperor.  This led to a showdown.  Henry IV summoned a conference of bishops in Worms.  They determined that the election of Hildebrand was invalid.  When Gregory was brought the news and commanded to abdicate, he refused and also responded by raising the stakes: Henry was ‘bound with the chains of anathema,’ and he was excommunicated from the Church.

His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him.  Henry himself, as a tyrant and enemy of God, was deposed. …Henry’s authority went into meltdown.

Many of his princely vassals set out to dismember his kingdom.  Henry was cornered.  He then set off, in the dead of winter, to cross the Alps and head for Canossa.  When he arrived, he stood shivering at the gates for three days before being allowed by Gregory to enter.  With a kiss, all was forgiven.

But not forgotten.  Henry would soon renege, capturing Rome in 1084 and causing the pope to flee.  The pope’s supporters would level violent propaganda against Henry: he was a pervert, an arsonist, even a violator of nuns!

Convert…or Die

 

…the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

The time is the mid- eighth century.  Boniface, missionary to the Anglo-Saxons in the Germanic parts of the Frankish Empire, would be slaughtered, along with his companions – martyrs, toiling in fields occupied by worshippers of Woden king of the demons.  Boniface, following the example of Christ, prohibited his companions from drawing swords.

Stories of runes died in Christian blood did not scare off these monks; it served to inspire their sense of purpose.  Hel, the pagan underworld became the abode of the damned: hell; Eostre, the festival of the spring, became Easter.  “The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old.” 

Boniface would chop down a sacred oak to Thunor, a mighty a fearsome god, “whose hammer-blows could spit mountains.”  With its timbers, he would build a church.

Even those won for Christ, however, would not be separated from their earlier customs: sacrifices offered to springs, inspecting entrails, claims of reading the future.  Even churches that reached back centuries were not immune to practices such as these.  Slaves sold for sacrifice, in addition to goats and bulls; fornicating bishops, whose only qualification was inheritance from their father; blood feuds.

Yet, in addition to support from the pope, he won a powerful patron: Charles Martel.  Martel saw in Boniface a man who could help tame the east.  The Frankish princes would not follow Boniface’s lead.  Three days after the aforementioned slaughter, a squad of Christian warriors found the killers – and wiped them out; their women and children enslaved.

The pagans, having learned their lesson, concluded to follow the teaching of the now-dead Boniface.  The method of conversion would not be lost on future Carolingian monarchs.  There were more oaks to fell.  In 772, fifty years after Boniface’s felling of Thunor’s oak, an even greater totem would come crashing down: Irminsul, believed to uphold the heavens.  It did not, as the skies remained in their place.

This was the work of Charles – Charlemagne.  The west had its emperor – no longer tied to the emperor in Constantinople, the New Rome.  Charlemagne would annex northern Italy, take Barcelona back from the Arabs, and push deep in the Carpathian basin.  But his bloodiest wars, lasting many years, were against the Saxons:

A Fallen Rome

 

Even in Pessinus itself, Cybele’s hold was slipping.  The great bulk of her temple, which for centuries had dominated the city, increasingly stood as a monument not to her potency, but to her fading.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

The time is the latter part of the fourth century.  Pessinus, a city with Hellenistic roots, was located in Asia Minor and would become an archbishopric.  In Roman times, Cybele would come to be known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother").

Flavius Claudius Julianus was not at all pleased with the condition of the temple; Rome, after all, by now and after Constantine, had turned decidedly Christian.  Julianus, however, had repudiated Christianity despite having been raised a Christian: Julian the Apostate is how the Church remembers him.

I have written of Julian before.  He believed that if the temple was rebuilt in Jerusalem (thus re-establishing the legitimacy of Judaism), this would take away one of the strongest arguments from the upstart Christians – that their faith traced its lineage all the way back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  From my earlier post:

In the winter of 362 – 363, Julian appointed his close friend, Alypius, to oversee the rebuilding of the temple.

The construction, however, was abruptly cut short later in the spring by an earthquake or some other disaster.  The pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus said that balls of fire burst from underneath the foundations, and Christian historians reported that fire came down from heaven to burn the site and the workers.  The project was abandoned.

In June, Julian was killed in battle. And that was that.

Returning to Holland, Julian faced another uphill battle: these Christians supported not only their own poor, but the poor of pagan Romans and Greeks as well.  Collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned and shipwrecked.  With many women converting (given their status recognized by the Apostle Paul when compared to their status under Roman law), their children would be raised Christian and soon enough their wealthy husbands would follow.  Even more aid to the poor would result.

Basil and Gregory, two brothers, each would be elected bishop of different regions in Asia Minor.  Coming from a wealthy family, they would devote their lives to the poor.  Basil would open what might be known as the first hospital; Gregory would denounce slavery as an unpardonable offence against God.

But it was the babies who were the most vulnerable and least valued members of Roman society.  Left at the side of the road or on a pile of rubbish, dropped down drains and sewers.  Those rescued would be brought up as slaves, or to work in brothels.  Aristotle lent the practice his prestige.  Other than the Jews or the odd German tribe, few ever questioned these practices – some cities even proclaimed such practices virtuous. 

Until the Christians.  It was Macrina, the sister of Basil and Gregory, who would devote herself to the rescue of these abandoned infants.

Within a century or so of Julian’s anger regarding the neglect of the temple to Cybele, many of the temples devoted to the Roman gods would be neglected – converted not to churches, but left to the weeds and wild animals.

Institution

 

In the summer of 313, Carthage was a city on the edge.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

In 258, the city’s most celebrated bishop, Cyprian, was executed.  He had confirmed that which he had taught – a “peculiarly militant” understanding of the faith.  Purity was everything, no compromise with evil was acceptable.

So, in 303, when an edict came down for Christians to turn over all of their books of scripture or face death, Africa was at the forefront of resistance.  The edict was expanded: make sacrifice to the Roman gods.  Those who refused were dragged in chains and executed.  The time was, perhaps, the most brutal persecution the church in Carthage had endured.

The failure of the authorities to uproot the Church only served to increase the prestige of the Christian leaders who resisted.  I think about the handful of examples of such Christian leaders today – those who have resisted the evils of the last two years.  A small number, but enough for a remnant.

A question pertinent to our day (albeit, we are not yet facing the same physical persecution…yet):

How, in the wake of a concentrated effort to wipe the Church from the face of Africa, were Christians best to defend the sanctity of their faith?

Into this tempest stepped a new bishop, Donatus.  The year was 313.  Donatus and his followers could not stand the betrayal by some Christians to turn over their scriptures.  These would be known as traditores, surrenderers – those who handed over.  They had saved their skins and cost their souls.

Donatus was not the only man, however, who claimed the title as bishop of Carthage.  There was also Caecilian, who won the bishopric two years earlier; but his election was contested.  He was rumored to have not only turned over scriptures, but to have colluded in the persecution of those who had not.

In the meantime, a civil war in Italy.  Constantine and the Milvian Bridge; the vision of the cross in the sky.  He won a decisive victory.  In 313, he would issue a proclamation giving legal standing to Christianity, yet avoided naming ‘the divinity who sits in heaven.’  Could be the Christian God, could be Apollo.  By blurring divisions, he hoped to sow some level of peace.

Constantine would write favorably toward the Church in Carthage, specifically assuring Caecilian of his sympathies for ‘the most holy Catholic Church.’  For this, Donatus was not pleased.  A man not interested in compromise, he would write to Constantine, who would offer a hearing in front of bishops in Rome.  They found against him, and he lost again upon appeal.  For Donatus and his followers, this did not settle the matter.

Constantine grew weary of this division among Christians, exaggerated further when Donatus slipped the guards placed to watch him.  These episodes only served to throw the support of Constantine further behind Caecilian.

“What business has the emperor with the church?”, Donatus would write.  Constantine, on the other hand, demonstrated that as long as the bishops assented to a unified church, they could rely on his backing.  But, as was now clear, there was no formal means by which such unity could be maintained.

Instead, to Constantine’s intense frustration, they insisted in squabbling over issues that seemed better suited to philosophers.

In 324, this frustration would boil over, being alerted to constant debates about the precise nature of Christ:

‘When all this subtle wrangling of yours is over questions of little or no significance, why worry about harmonizing your views?  Why not instead consign your differences to the secret custody of your own minds and thoughts?’

Constantine was learning that his questions were, perhaps, naïve.  The questions of who Christ had truly been, how He might have been both divine and human, and how to best understand and define the Trinity.  How could God be properly worshipped if there was not some agreement on His very nature?

In 325, Constantine would summon the bishops from across the empire – and even beyond.  The purpose was to settle on a creed, a statement of belief, proper behaviors for the faithful.  The council would be held in Nicaea.

A month of debate ensued.  A creed was settled, and twenty canons drawn up.  The handful of delegates who dissented were formally banished.  But the scope of the event could not be diminished; a declaration of belief that was proclaimed universal:

The sheer number of delegates, drawn from locations ranging from Mesopotamia to Britain, gave to their deliberations a weight that no single bishop or theologian could hope to rival.

Even Origen’s own formula on the nature of the Trinity would be deemed heretical.  One man against a council.  Yet, this was, as we know, not the end of the matter….

The Donatists were not satisfied.  They would strip a Catholic bishop naked and fling him from the top of a tower onto a pile of excrement.  They would tie a necklace of dead dogs around another.  Or pull the tongue out of a third and cut off his right hand.

Conclusion

“What business has the emperor with the church?”  Recall this from Donatus.  Decades on from the deaths of both Donatus and Caecilian, the killings would continue and the divisions widen.  The sense of moral certitude grew ever more entrenched on both sides.

Throughout Christian history, the yearning to reject a corrupt and contaminated world, to refuse any compromise with it, to aspire to a condition of untainted purity, would repeatedly manifest itself.

Yet, still, a pattern was set in motion.  By establishing such a council – not the first, as the Council of Jerusalem around 50 AD is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles – Constantine would take a major step toward the establishment of a universal Church and an institutional practice by which to maintain it.

Which, as we know with the benefit of 1700 years of hindsight and despite the tremendously valuable outcomes of the various subsequent councils, also would bring its own baggage.

Formation

 

As a young man, he had sat at the feet of the local bishop, ‘a steadfast witness of truth’ by the name of Polycarp – and who, so Irenaeus reported, had in his turn known the gospel-writer John.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

The time is the latter part of the second century.  Irenaeus would travel from Asia Minor to Gaul, which, by then, already had a local population of Christians.  He was able to take such a journey for the same reason that the Apostle Paul was able to travel long distances: Roman roads and Roman governance.  He would write:

“It is thanks to them that we are able to walk along well-kept roads without fear, and take ship wherever we wish.”

Local mobs and the empire felt otherwise.  And it is this that Holland describes, in 177 in the Rhône valley:

…so capriciously did the violence spread, and so savagely did it manifest itself, that it seemed to its victims to have erupted from a realm of darkness beyond the merely human.

Beaten, then imprisoned, then subject to being gored by bulls, savaged by dogs, or roasted on red-hot chairs of iron.  One wonders if those safe Roman roads were merely roads to hell.  This, taken from a letter written quite possibly by Irenaeus himself (as quoted by Eusebius):

“Those things reckoned by men low, and invisible, and contemptible, are precisely what God ranks as deserving of great glory.”

A sentiment more contrary to Roman virtue could not be found.  This was exemplified in Blandina, a slave girl, enduring every torture and torment.  Other Christians relented, but not her.  In the arena, her broken body had seemed transfigured:

Her fellow martyrs, in the midst of their own agonies, ‘had looked upon their sister, and seen in her person the One who was crucified for them.’

But had Christ really suffered so?  Some thought He was only spirit; it was inconceivable that Christ might have actually suffered death.  Some thought that, at the last minute, He tricked an ignorant man to take His place on the cross.  Those who suffered as Blandina did were pathetically deluded.

Irenaeus embraced the necessity for orthodoxy.  “Beliefs, after all, did not patrol themselves.”  He was in an authentic battle of ideas, condemning heresies and thereby approving orthodoxy.  The origin of doctrines would be traced back to the time of the apostles. 

But the heresies would come.  Marcion was revolted by the idea that Christ might have had a human body; the God that sent Christ was not the God of creation.  Marcion’s canon would include ten letters of Paul, and a condensed version of Luke – and, certainly, it would exclude the Jewish scripture in its entirety.

Irenaeus would counter this: the Jewish scripture was declared essential reading for all Christians.  He would include, in addition to Luke’s gospel, that of John, Matthew and Mark.  All other accounts of Christ’s life were deemed “ropes woven out of sand.”

Nero, Burning Rome, and the Apostle Paul

Bands of itinerant priests, dancing as they travelled and playing flutes and kettle-drums, were a common sight on the Galatian roads.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

Some would work themselves up in a lather of prophecy, indulging in “spectacular orgiastic rites.”  But copulation was not possible for the most celebrated of these:

The Galli, men dressed as women, were servants of Cybele, the Mother Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia….

Next time someone claims to be transgendered, ask them if they take their belief this seriously:

…and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of their testicles.

This is how Holland introduces the chapter entitled AD 19: Galatia.

The Jews, of course, fell under no such spells.  Alone among the population, they continued to hold true to the idea that there was only one God.  And it was one of these, the Apostle Paul, that would, decades later, come to Galatia to preach the Good News – to evangelize.

Yet what Paul had to say was no less subversive of Torah than it was of Caesar.  Although, perhaps only a decade before, what he was now preaching was certainly folly to him as well.  A crucified criminal was somehow part of the identity of the one true God.

The God that Paul preached recognized no divisions in male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free.  A phenomenally remarkable and radical concept in both the Roman and Jewish worlds.  He would continue this message in Ephesus, Thessalonica, Philippi, and elsewhere.  He would suffer beatings and imprisonments, shipwrecks and extortions. 

It is estimated that he travelled ten-thousand miles in his lifetime – a remarkable amount for the time and for one not a military conqueror.  But there were always new people to win for Christ.  He wrote many letters, well-versed in the art of rhetoric: “a brilliant, expressive, highly emotional correspondent.”

He was brought disturbing news from Galatia, resulting in his impassioned and frantic letter, asking who has put such a spell on the foolish Galatians.  Their history of sorcery was coming through in their expression of Christ – to accept the law of Moses in full. 

Circumcision or not, the value is the same.  But if you have bought into this, Paul offered…go all the way and castrate yourselves.  That was, after all the way of the Galatians not even a few years before. 

Corinth was a different type of city, international and cosmopolitan.  Two crowded harbors, and international reputation for glamor.  The church he would found there was populated by Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, some with Roman names, some with Greek.  The church was a globalist church, not limited to tribe or sex.  Baptism washed away the old identity, giving a new.

The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  All you need is love.

Well, yes…and no.  First comes love the Lord your God with all your heart.  Second, introducing John Lennon only introduces confusion…and blasphemy.

Paul struggled with the integration of the idea of “all equal in Christ” with the reality of roles of husband and wife, slave and master, etc.  His was not an attempt to lay down some new law of Christ, but to get others to realize it within themselves.  All men, not only the Jews, had some sense of right and wrong written on their hearts, as spelled out in Romans 2.

Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.

Our Christian Culture

 

Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be orgnanised, and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of antiquity, still less of ‘human nature,’ but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

Tom Holland was raised in a Christian family, and attended Christian Sunday School – until he asked the teacher about a picture of Adam and Eve with dinosaurs.  The lack of an answer – not even a bad answer, but any answer – convinced him that Christianity offered little value.

Ancient Rome and Greece – these grabbed his attention, and his heart.  Yet, the more he studied antiquity, the more he came to feel alien to it.  Eugenics, young trained in the art of murder, Caesar, celebrated for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more.  None of this offered a modern liberal anything to cheer.

He has told the story often: having written a less-than-flattering history of the birth of Islam, he was challenged by a Muslim to do the same regarding his own religion.  What do you mean, my religion?  In any case, he dove into the history of Christianity, and found it told his story far more than he ever thought.

How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?

How did we in the West become as we are?  Even as the West has disposed of Christianity, it is Christianity that is seen throughout – Holland has described the culture wars of the West as a Christian civil war.  Many arguments made by those clamoring for social justice (in today’s bastardized sense of the term) are based on not-quite-complete Christian arguments.  Try making those same arguments in ancient Rome….

Yet, many in the West are reluctant to contemplate this foundation.  We see it even in the new atheists – arguing for Christian ethics while pretending that Christianity had (or has) nothing to do with these. 

He begins with a look at ancient Athens – to set some sort of foundation.  The many gods, the many sacrifices and offerings; would something sacrifice be overlooked?  Further, what kind of gods were these?

The gods, inscrutable and whimsical as they were, rarely deigned to explain themselves.  They certainly never thought to regulate morals.  The oracle at Delphi might offer advice, but not ethical instruction.

An examination of democracy at the time: ‘Such a mob should never rank as citizens,’ quoting Aristotle.   The most accomplished kings, or Caesars would be celebrated a lord and savior.  A Graeco-Egyptian god invented to merge Greek and Egyptian in Alexandria. 

There was something called natural law – but nothing like that which has come to be identified post-Christianity.  While recognizing the spark of the divine in each individual, they nevertheless found that the spark in some was more valuable in the eyes of the gods than the spark in others.

The siege of Jerusalem, 63 B.C.  The locals knew they were doomed, at the wrong end of Pompey’s battering rams.  Twelve thousand lay dead; Roman casualties were light.  Not like Jerusalem was a great prize: distant from the sea; a “backwater.”  Besides, the locals had some strange customs: circumcision, the refusal to eat pork, they rested every seventh day – a reality that Pompey took full advantage of when preparing for the siege.

Deus Vult

 

A month after his dedication of the major ecclesia, and Urban was presiding over his second council of the year: an even larger assembly of reform-minded bishops and abbots than Piacenza had seen.

-          Millennium, Tom Holland

This would be Pope Urban II, otherwise known as Odo of Châtillon.  The year was 1095; the location of the assembly was the ancient town of Clermont in Auvergne. 

And then there was the assembly that preceded this – Piacenza, just south of Milan and from which he traveled onward to France.  At Piacenza he would meet with diplomats from Constantinople, with a message from the Basileus, Alexius Comnenus.   

Finding the Turks engaged in infighting, Alexius thought the opportunity had come to capitalize on their squabbling.  He must go on the offensive; a second Manzikert would be the end of the Church in the East. 

And so it was, looking around for reinforcements that might offer him a reasonable prospect of success, while also remaining safely expendable, that Alexius’s gaze had turned towards the West.

Let’s you and him fight!  While this wasn’t the message brought to Urban, it certainly was on the mind of the Eastern emperor.  Which brings us to Clermont; on 27 November, Urban would address the crowd of a few hundred in an open field with a message that would soon ring through Western Christendom:

“If any man sets out from pure devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.”

Jerusalem: a city with no strategic or military significance; to take on such a journey would require five times the annual income of the average lord.  All to fight an enemy that had already brought Constantinople to the brink. 

Little did Urban expect that his call would be heeded not merely by fighters on horseback; the crowds would shout “Deus vult”: God wills it.  For any who cared to be spotless before God, this was an unparalleled opportunity. 

A whole new road to the City of God has suddenly opened up before the Christian people.  The heroic labour of buttressing the world against Antichrist, and of preparing for that dreadful hour of judgement.

Thousands upon thousand would set of for Jerusalem – most horseless with no ability to fight (for an overview of the make-up of this bunch, covering both glory and warts, see here).  Alexius, to his consternation, found the whole of the West on the march – toward him, toward Constantinople.  He would attempt to bribe and browbeat the leaders of this fantastic advance to obedience – not that he would lead them in battle, as he knew the risks and reality of the situation. 

By June 1097, Nicaea was brought to capitulate by this Western force, and the banner of the Second Rome once again flew over the birthplace of the creed.  A month later, the crusaders would break a formidable Turkish army in open battle.  By the following spring, Alexius felt safe enough to follow:

…taking full advantage of his enemies’ reverses, Alexius dispatched his brother-in-law to mop up in the crusaders’ wake.

In the summer, Alexius would finally lead an army himself, recovering perhaps half the territories lost after Manzikert.  Yet, even now and after hearing news of the grim reality facing the crusaders, Alexius would not risk his position: