The Hellenic moment in ancient Christianity (1)

In a recent comment I cited a book which describes how Western Christianity absorbed a great deal of Germanic pagan culture following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and how what we now think of as traditional Christianity took on a Germanic martial tinge as a result. In that post I referred to the Christianity of the Empire as "primitive" Christianity, as distinguished from the later Germanized kind. Actually, this is much too simplistic, as is shown in Peter Brown's well-known and valuable (also, readable and not very long) work, The World of Late Antiquity (1971).

While Brown does not set out an explicit scheme, he seems to divide the history of Christianity in the Roman Empire into three phases, only the first of which can rightfully be called "primitive". This was Christianity in its first two centuries, until about 300 A.D., a date which coincides roughly with the legalization and encouragement of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine (313). During this period Christianity was a minority sect of the "saved", subject to occasional persecution and opposed to the pagan Roman civilization in which it made its home. It was also, Brown suggests, an austere worship of a "half-known High God", a religion which was unable to find meaning in the visible world (p. 78). Indeed, one might add, it looked forward to the end of that world. Another leading scholar in this area, Ramsey MacMullen (Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, p. 150), also points out that primitive Christianity was essentially cultureless, for example lacking music in its worship, and for this reason probably not very attractive to the majority of pagans, despite its claim to hold a monopoly on personal salvation.

Brown's third phase of Christianity, which might be called the "monastic", somewhat resembles the first, primitive one in that it also represents an unworldly form of the religion; however, it became far more aggressive. Monasticism, Brown writes, arose as a result of the spread of the formerly urban Christianity into the villages of North Africa and the Middle East. There, men like St. Anthony (d. 356), the "father of the monks", reacted drastically to the Gospel, breaking altogether with the existing, still largely pagan, culture and withdrawing into the desert; during the fourth century their movement spread explosively, all the way to Western Europe. The number of monastics was never terribly large, but these supermen of asceticism became the ideal of the masses, and thereby largely determined the character of the religion in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Paganism was "brutally demolished from below" by monastic Christianity (p. 104). The monks were fanatics, responsible for a wave of anti-pagan and anti-Jewish vigilantism from Mesopotamia to North Africa. This apparently began towards the end of the fourth century. Largely it involved the destruction of religious buildings (notably the Serapeum of Alexandria, in 391) and idols, but it also included physical violence. What is perhaps the single most notorious act of Christian fanaticism, the lynching of the Alexandrian philosopher, the lady Hypatia (415), was part of this movement. "For the pagans, cowed by this unexpected wave of terrorism, it was the end of the world."

This phenomenon of monastic fanaticism raises some troubling questions about the essential nature of Christianity. The monastics seem to have combined the worst of two worlds: one the one hand they renounced worldly responsibilities, yet at the same time they were willing to be brutally worldly when it was a question of imposing their doctrines on the rest of society. What was the source of this intolerance? Christian intolerance is sometimes traced to the Old Testament's hatred of the worship of false gods, as found for example in Deut. 13:6–10 ("If your brother, . . . or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend . . . entices you secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve other gods,' . . . . You shall stone him to death . . ."). Yet the Old Testament, representing the culture of a specific nation, ancient Israel, seems to be outside the unworldly, universalistic core of Christianity as expressed in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospels; and in the Gospels, any injunction not to tolerate false religious beliefs is absent, as far as I am aware. Intolerance perhaps arises more essentially from the combination of the belief that one is in possession of absolute truth with a concern either for the world or for other people's souls: it is worth suppressing those who deny absolute truth, in order to prevent them from spreading error. Intolerance is therefore inherent in vulgar forms of monotheism, which are unable to distinguish between ultimate truth and the provisional understanding of that truth which is all that is available to human beings. (See Pannenberg, 1994, who points out that Paul, in I Corinthians 13:9—12, recognizes the provisional nature of truth).