The victory of Christianity as the official and only tolerated
religion of the Empire coincided chronologically with the beginning
of the mass invasion of the Germans into the Western Empire. In
fact, many of the Germans had been "converted" to Christianity
before their invasion of Western Europe. However, mere conversion
had not effected any marked transformation of Germanic cultural
values. For that a long process of education would be necessary.
For example, Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, successfully
liquidated by savage force and ruse all possible challengers to
his throne. He persuaded the son of a fellow king to assassinate
his father, then arranged the brutal murder of the son. Denying
all knowledge of the plot, he persuaded the people to choose him
a king in place of the murdered father and son. The Christian
bishop who tells us this story comments:
"He received Sigibert's kingdom with his treasures, and placed
the people, too, under his rule. For God was laying his enemies
low everyday under his hand, and was increasing his kingdom, because
he walked with an upright heart before him, and did what was pleasing
in his eyes."
Clovis and his bishop biographer were a long way in spirit from
Jesus, the teacher and healer of Nazareth, who had taught a doctrine
of brotherly love and peace.
It is not surprising, however, that Germans, educated to their
own system of values, should have failed to grasp the full Christian
message. Clovis, in becoming a Christian, meant to enlist for
his designs the protection and support of a god more powerful
than those he had hitherto worshipped. Gregory, bishop of Tours,
the historian of Clovis' reign, commended all that Clovis did
because the king had espoused Roman doctrine in preference to
the Arian heresy accepted by many of the Germanic invaders. Neither
of them is likely to have thought of trying to practice Christian
ethics in the warlike society of the Franks.
Christianity itself had changed since the time of its founder.
Any major religion takes its shape from a complex set of factors:
1. the teachings of its founders,
2. the interpretation of those teachings by successors,
3. the organization set up for worship and religious discipline,
4. the mental attitudes and traditions of the converts,
5. the conditions under which the religion spreads.
In the case of Christianity, a simple narrative of "what
happened" is virtually impossible. Jesus gave his message
to Jews, a civilized people living in a highly complex society
created by interaction among Greeks, Romans, and oriental peoples
on one of the strategic highways of the world. The message was
carried to speculative and argumentative Greeks, to disciplined
and civilized or enslaved and impoverished Romans, to partially
Romanized and civilized Celts in Gaul and Britain, to "the
wild Irish," and to other Barbarians outside the boundaries
of the "civilized world."
Let us begin our tracing of the development of Christianity with
the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He taught a way of life and faith
grounded in a long-established prophetic tradition of Judaism.
He emphasized the love and mercy of God, the love and brotherhood
of men of good will, the unimportance of worldly wealth and power,
and the comfort and promise of redemption and happiness in a blessed
hereafter.
Some authorities contend that Jesus may have been influenced in
his rejection of success in the world by the Essenes, an ascetic
sect of Jews who were in conflict with the Jewish establishment
and had withdrawn to retreats in the desert near the Dead Sea,
where they practiced an extreme asceticism and a rigid adherence
to the ancient law. They lived in hope of an apocalyptic deliverance
from the world of the flesh and he devil. These practices and
concepts derived ultimately from Persian religious ideas of the
5th and 6th centuries BC.
Jesus, in contrast, did not withdraw from the society but went
out to teach and preach among the humble and poor, to help and
heal the sick and the destitute, in other words, to change conditions
in the world as well as to give men hope for a hereafter. He taught
the observance of ancient Jewish law but said that the law was
made for men, not man for the law. On the whole, the connection
with the Essenes is inadequately proved.
Most of the Jews did not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah
(or in Greek, Christos) who would bring "justice and righteousness
from this time forth and for evermore." There were those
who thought he was an impostor and subverter of the social order.
There seems little in his teaching to threaten either the Jewish
or the Roman establishment. Yet, he was arrested and crucified,
a common Roman penalty for criminal activities. Then, from the
brief, tragic story of his life and mission, his followers created
that powerful and enduring myth that became the center and core
of Christianity as it spread through the Mediterranean world.
Peter, one of the twelve whom Jesus chose as his disciples, and
Paul, a convert who had been a persecutor of Christians, made
the crucial decision to preach and teach the faith among Gentiles
as well a s Jews and not to require circumcision or Jewish observances
other than he basic ethical teachings of the ancient Hebrews.
The carrying out of this decision led to the spread of the religion
throughout the Roman Empire and beyond its boundaries in the first
great experiment in mass education the world had yet seen.
Ancient religions had been public, that is, participated in by
all the inhabitants of a city-state or the members of a nation,
or they had been "mystery" religions, participated in
only by an initiated few who had been properly inducted into the
celebration of the rites. Christianity became the greatest of
the mystery religions in the sense that baptism and instruction
were necessary for introduction to its rights. It kept its social
character, speaking a message of hope and comfort for mankind.
Moreover it became also an explanation of man's existence and
purpose in the world that challenged the best minds of the period.
Changes in Christianity occurred, no doubt, because men brought
to the religion what they had to give and took form it what they
were able to take on the basis of their past experience. Paul,
for example, brought to the faith a vast knowledge of Jewish scripture
and rabbinical tradition as well as of Greek philosophy. He brought
also the ardent of spirit that had made him a great persecutor
of Christians, and he brought the testimony of his own conversion.
It was he who created a comprehensive theology in which the death
and resurrection of Christ, the son of God, given by God for the
redemption of man kind, became the culminating event in the world's
history. And it was he, in the many pastoral letters he wrote
to congregations that he had formed, who introduced the emphasis
on the rejection of the world of the flesh and the devil and on
the experience of conversion as the highest experience of the
Christian.
But the disputatious Greeks, Jews, and other oriental converts
of the eastern Roman Empire could not accept any one exegesis
of the theology of Christianity, particularly not of the difficult
problem of Christ's relation to god. How could Christ, being God,
be born like any other human baby from he womb of a human mother.
Did this in some way affect his divinity? Was God the Father,
superior to the Son? did He exist before the Son, and what was
the nature of the Holy ghost by whom Mary was supposed to have
been impregnated?
The controversy over the nature of Christ rose to such a pitch
in the early fourth century that Emperor Constantine decided to
call a general council of church leaders at Nicea (325) to settle
the violent dispute initiated by the teachings of Arius, a priest
of the great Egyptian city of Alexandria. He taught that Christ,
having been born of a woman, was of a nature subordinate (though
still divine) to God. The formula adopted at Nicea is the basis
of the creed as recited in many Christian churches today:
"We believe in one God, the Father, all-sovereign, maker
of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible;
and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten
of the Father before all the ages, Light of Light, true God of
true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father...."
This formula did not, as hoped, settle the question. The followers
of Arius continued to teach their heretical doctrine and even
took it to the ?Germans beyond the Roman frontiers, thus creating
for Church authorities a doctrinal problem in the education of
the Germans to add to the already difficult problem of Christianizing
their savage behavior.
Paul was not the only highly educated man to become converted
to the Christian faith during its early history. As men trained
in the schools of Athens, Alexandria, and other great centers
of learning became converts, they brought into the faith their
knowledge and their methods of disputation acquired in these schools.
The first four centuries of the Christian era were the age of
the so-called Fathers of the Church, the scholars who elaborated
a Christian theology in answer to challenges from their former
colleagues and who created a Christian literature that became
the heritage of medieval men in search of wisdom.
During these early centuries also a Christian church came into
being, that is, a public institution with an apparatus for spreading
the faith, for maintaining its purity, for ordering its worship,
and for protecting the faithful against hostile external power.
From the beginning when the disciples were left frightened and
confused by the sudden loss and departing injunctions of their
leader, the central part of remembrance and worship had been the
celebration of the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection
in a ceremony in which participants partook of bread and wine
thought by miraculous transformation to be the body and blood
of Christ. The ceremony was thus a communion with the resurrected
Christ by consuming the flesh and blood of his incarnation. It
was thus a kind of incarnation for the communicants and highly
sacred ritual. Only initiates, that is, those instructed and baptized
in the faith, could be admitted.
Someone was needed to preside over the ceremony. In response to
this and also the need for caretakers to control the common funds
contributed by converts to the congregations, there emerged officers
of the faith: on the one had, priests and bishops to lead in spiritual
matters, on the other deacons to take care of the money and other
common property of the congregations. Quite naturally there developed
a doctrine of Apostolic Succession.
All properly constituted priests were expected to be able to trace
their authority back to the disciples, those whom Christ himself
had constituted the propagators of the faith. Bishops were the
chief among these. They had their seats in the principle cities
of the Mediterranean world and, eventually, the west European
world. The churches in which they presided were called cathedrals
to differentiate them as the higher seats of authority.
In the East there were many great cities. The greatest of them,
Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and from the time of Constantine,
his new city, Constantinople. In the West there was the one great
city, Rome, the dominant city of the Mediterranean world during
the first crucial centuries of Christianity. Not unnaturally,
bishops of Rome claimed from early times a pre-eminent power in
the Church. Scriptural justification was found in the words of
Christ to Peter, the traditional first bishop of Rome:
"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it..."
Bishops of Rome did not always find it easy to enforce this doctrine
of the Petrine Succession on a vast and rapidly growing church.
But there was a historical logic in it which could be a source
of strength to bishops of Rome like Leo I in the 5th century and
Gregory I at the end of the 6th.
Persecution of Christians by the Roman authorities encouraged
the spread of the faith and a change in its emphasis. "The
blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church." A cult
of martyrs developed, and even those who had not the heart for
martyrdom themselves revered local martyrs, and believed in the
miracles reported of them in their lives and of their relics after
death. For simple and uneducated people, these martyr-saints supplied
the place of older deities who had been credited with magical
powers and gave them something closer than a remote majestic God
and his crucified Son with which to meet the terrors and trials
of the world.
Roman persecutions were not just haphazard and irresponsible,
although they were certainly atrocious. The crux of the problem
as it became clear in the early second century, in the reign of
Trajan (98-117), was that the Christians were uncivic in spirit.
They intolerantly refused to take part in the public worship of
the old gods that was part of the civic duty of Roman citizens.
Owing to the secrecy of their central rites, open only to initiates,
wild charges could be made against them of sacrificing children,
drinking their blood, and the like. Persecutions continued with
increasing severity until at the end of the reign of Diocletion
(303-305) a last all-out effort was made to exterminate the Christians
and destroy the Church. This failed, and Diocletion's successors
then embarked on a policy of toleration. In the Edict of Milan
(313) they declared:
"...we decided that....it was right that Christians and all
others should have freedom to follow the kind of religion they
favored...."
By the end of the 4th century, the triumph of Christianity was
so complete that Emperor Theodosius (379-395) adopted Christianity
as the exclusive religion of the Empire by issuing an edict requiring:
"...that all the various nations which are subject to our
clemency and moderation should continue in the profession of that
religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle
Peter...."
With the end of persecution there emerges a new type of Christian
leader and a new mode of Christian life. The kudos that had formerly
gone to the martyr-saints wee transferred to the hermits and monks,
who, having withdrawn to the solitude of the desert a wilderness,
had succeeded in conquering the temptations of the world, the
flesh, and the devil by self-imposed austerities and constant
prayer.
Monasticism had started in the third century in the eastern Mediterranean
region as a movement of individuals in flight from the corruption
of the cities to the peace of the desert. Notable hermits like
St. Anthony (250-350?) were sought out by imitators. The large
number who desired to emulate these first hermits necessitated
the organization of communities in order to maintain discipline.
The monastic movement became more social in character. Monks and
nuns lived in communities apart from the world, but they prayed
together and practiced the Christian virtues of love, humility,
and obedience in their relations with one another. St. Benedict
(480-543), who formulated the monastic rule that became the model
for all others in the West, did not reject life or social values.
He thought of the monastery as a school for the teaching of the
true Christian life.
An abbot was to be chosen by the monks themselves, the older and
wiser heads carrying the greatest weight. Once chosen, he was
to have an absolute paternal power. Yet he was to exercise this
power with humanity, sanity, and humility before God. The novice,
or candidate for the monastic life, had to give up the pleasures
and pains of sexual love, taking a vow of chastity before entering
the community. He was to have no personal property, not so much
as a knife or pen, and he was to obey the abbot and senior brothers
in all humility. Eating and sleeping were restricted to limits
balanced between the body's subordination to the spirit and its
natural animal needs. The monk was to divide his time among prayer,
labor for the community, study and meditation. The monastery became
his home and his family, and he was not to leave except on permission
or order of the abbot.
In relation to earlier laxities and other rules, St. Benedict's
was moderate, sensible, and deservedly triumphant in Western Europe.
St. Benedict did not directly enjoin study as a necessary part
of monastic life, although he did encourage reading for his monks.
Yet, inevitably, because the monasteries were sanctuaries from
the hazards of the world and because many who became abbots were
learned men, the copying and reading of books became part of the
monastic life.