Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (25 page)

Because Justin valued the whole of his spiritual exploration, he was concerned to explain his newly acquired Christian faith to those outside its boundaries in terms that they would understand; he was chief among a series of 'Apologists' who, in the second century, opened a dialogue with the culture around them in order to show that Christianity was superior to the elite wisdom of the age. In particular, he was happy to explain the mysterious relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father in terms which would make sense to intelligent Greeks puzzled by Christian claims. He deployed one of the commonplace terms used alike by Platonists, Stoics and Hellenized Jews influenced by the Jewish scholar of the first century CE Philo of Alexandria when they discussed divinity: Word (
Logos
), already the keynote theme of the hymn which so sonorously opens John's Gospel. For Justin, God the Father corresponded to Plato's discussion of a supreme Being. Justin wanted to say with the mainstream Church against gnosticism that this supreme God had created the material world, and he tried to get over the problem of relating the two by seeing the Logos as a mediator between them. This Logos had been glimpsed by the Hebrew prophets, but also by great philosophers like Plato, thus happily enrolled among Christian witnesses. The Logos was seen finally and completely in Jesus Christ, a being other than the Father, but derived from him with the fullness and intimacy of a flame which lights one torch from another: torchlight from torchlight, in a phrase which was embedded in the fourth century in the doctrinal statement which is now called the Nicene Creed.
⁷⁴

Such use of 'Logos' was popular among second-century theologians, and is to be found in Justin's younger contemporary, Irenaeus. Probably from Smyrna on the west coast of Asia Minor, Irenaeus travelled first to Rome for study and then to southern France and the city of Lyons. Persecution devastated the Christian Church there in 177, and among those killed was the bishop, Pothinus, so Irenaeus took his place. His career as a writer was shaped by the practical concerns of a father in God for a flock troubled both by official harassment and by alternatives offered by gnostic belief. He was not an innovative thinker like Justin, but, as one might expect from someone in his position, he defended Christianity against gnosticism just as Ignatius of Antioch had done, by emphasizing the tradition which the bishop embodied, such as the credal statements already noticed (see pp. 129-30). As we have already seen (see p. 121), Irenaeus took the word
hairesis
('self-chosen opinion'), used in the latest epistles in the New Testament in the sense of 'sect', and reapplied it to the whole spectrum of gnostic belief. He thereby implied that he was condemning a single if many-headed movement. Progressing from speaking of sectarianism, he was popularizing a concept with a prosperous future in Christian consciousness: heresy. It was the natural counterpart of his concept of a united 'Catholic' Christianity with a single leadership.

Irenaeus saw the vital centre of Catholic Christianity as the Eucharist, which could not be separated from the leadership role of the bishop who presided over it. He was determined to stress the importance of flesh and matter which he saw proclaimed in the Eucharist, and which gnostics rejected. Accordingly Irenaeus followed Justin in seeing God's purpose unfold through all human history. The Old Testament was the central text on that history - so much for Marcion's dismissal of it - and Irenaeus delighted in stressing the symmetries or 'recapitulations' which its text revealed: thus the fall of the first man, Adam, was remedied by the second Adam, Christ, rising from the dead; the disobedience of the woman Eve remedied by the obedience of the woman Mary; the fateful role of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was remedied by the Tree of Life which was Christ's cross.
⁷⁵
Such symmetries appealed to a culture fascinated by the poetry of numbers and geometry, and they make sense of the lively confidence with which both Justin and Irenaeus looked, on the basis of Revelation 20, to a coming earthly thousand-year rule of God's chosen (a
millennium
, hence the belief in such an event being known as millenarianism). Even though most other influential voices in the Church now found such apocalyptic themes embarrassing, the confidence which Justin and Irenaeus expressed is logical: one would expect God's final purpose to be expressed in his created world, since the doctrine of recapitulation showed that this is where his plans had worked out before.

Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin. He came from the important North African city of Carthage, which in the third and second centuries BCE had nearly succeeded in ending the steady rise of the Roman Republic. Its conquest, destruction and refoundation as a Roman colony had been so thoroughgoing that it was now a centre of Latin culture, with its own flourishing schools of advanced education; it is likely that a Latin-speaking Christian Church emerged first here rather than in Rome. The city's links with Rome were close, for it was the centre of the North African grain export trade, vital to the Roman emperors in their constant task of keeping their huge capital city supplied with free bread. The Christian Churches of Carthage and Rome followed this pattern of trade in maintaining close if not always friendly links. Tertullian had much to do with controversies which had Rome as their main stage.

Although much remains disputed about Tertullian's life and background, his writings reveal a man who had received a first-class Latin education. He showed his debt to the Classical tradition in the brilliance of his Latin literary style, which sparkles through his numerous theological and controversial works with all the verve and energy of a very talented and very bad-tempered high-class journalist. Unlike Justin, he affected to despise the Classical tradition, coining the rhetorical question which sums up the preoccupation of second-century Catholic theologians, 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?'
⁷⁶
But he could never escape it: he was a maverick Roman intellectual who spent his life in rebellion, in the end, even against the Catholic Church itself, because he became a champion of the Montanists in their schism. Despite the break, his memory was treasured in the North African Church, which repeatedly demonstrated the chafing against settled authority which the Montanists had already exhibited.

This paradoxical rebel could in one work bitterly abuse the Bishop of Rome for his laxity in enforcing what Tertullian saw as proper Christian rigour in moral standards, yet elsewhere write movingly of the honour which attached to the role of bishops in apostolic succession, including Rome itself.
⁷⁷
Supporters of Marcion, advocates of infant baptism, collaborators with imperial power, opponents of Montanism, all came under the lash of his pen. Tertullian suggested that the human soul is transmitted by parents to their children and is therefore inescapably associated with continuing human sin: this doctrine of 'traducianism' underlay the pessimistic view of the human condition and its imprisonment in original sin which was presented in an extreme form by that later theological giant from North Africa, Augustine of Hippo (see pp. 306-9).

Amid all that controversy, Tertullian fashioned much of the language which Latin Christians were destined to use to discuss the perplexities of their faith. He dealt combatively with a most perplexing problem which had evolved out of the Church's sense, perceptible already in the writings of Paul, that the one God is experienced in three aspects, as Father, Son and Spirit - creator, redeemer and strengthener. But what was the relationship between them? Oneness in divinity was somehow reflected in threeness - indeed, one would need a word to express that idea of threeness. It is to be found for the first time in Tertullian's writings, although probably he did not invent it:
Trinitas
. His discussion comes mainly in a typically abusive pamphlet which he wrote against a Christian from Asia Minor called Praxeas.
⁷⁸
Praxeas represented an important school of thought within second-century Christianity called Monarchianism, which was a reaction against the 'Logos' language used by theologians like Justin. Justin was so concerned to stress the difference in the role of Father and Son that he had gone as far as to talk of the Logos as 'other than the God who made all', although he was quick to try to cover himself by adding, 'I mean in number not in mind'.
⁷⁹
This did not save him from accusations that theologians like him were endangering the basic Christian idea of the unity of God; but in turn those 'Monarchians' who stressed unity were in danger of losing any concept of distinctiveness between Father, Son and Spirit. So it was not merely Tertullian who became deeply concerned at their assertions.

Monarchian models of God could take two forms. One, 'Adoptionist Monarchianism', explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the Father's power rested in his human form. Some early writers such as Hermas in his book the
Shepherd
had taken this view without being singled out for condemnation, but late-second-century Monarchians like Theodotus, who came to Rome from Byzantion, took the idea much further. For him, Jesus was a man like other men apart from his miraculous birth; at his baptism in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit had descended on him and given him the power to work miracles, but that did not mean that he became God. Because of this emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit in Jesus's 'promotion', this view is sometimes called
dynamic
(from the Greek
dynamis,
'power').

The other Monarchian approach was 'modalist', so called because it saw the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as corresponding merely to different aspects or modes of the same divine being, playing transitory parts in succession, like an actor on the Classical stage donning a theatrical mask to denote a tragic or a comic role. The Latin word for this theatrical mask was '
persona'
. That root word for the English word 'person' underlines the difficulty of talking about the Trinity, because in later Christian discussion, far from describing a series of temporary roles, the idea of 'person' was instead attached to the individual and unchanging natures of Father, Son or Spirit, in a view of the Trinity which represented (among other things) the defeat of the Monarchian viewpoint. Modalist Monarchianism is often known as 'Sabellianism', commemorating an otherwise obscure late-second-century exponent of the idea, and a term of abuse which has been flung around at various periods in Church circles with about as much discrimination as Senator Joe McCarthy once used the word 'Communist'.

The Roman authorities eventually condemned both forms of Monarchianism at the turn of the second and third centuries, but three successive Roman bishops had hesitated to do so, a symptom of the way in which earlier Christianity had not been prepared to shut down a plurality of ways of viewing its most difficult theological problems.
⁸⁰
Monarchian ideas were not going to disappear; they were an inevitable consequence of a faith which wants to talk about God as both one and three. In particular, many Christians associated one Greek word with Monarchian thinkers:
homoousios
, meaning 'of one substance', which could be applied to the intimate and direct relationship of Father and Son. Now it sits apparently innocently in the Nicene Creed recited by millions in every Eucharist, but once it rang alarm bells for many Christians, especially in the East. Its use seemed to endanger the separate identities of the three persons of the Trinity, since it had been used by Monarchians in the third century, in particular Paul of Samosata, a Syrian Christian who had been deposed as Bishop of Antioch on an enjoyably ripe variety of scandalous charges. For that reason,
homoousios
proved to be capable of tearing the Christian world apart in the fourth century, as we will see (see pp. 211-22).

ALEXANDRIAN THEOLOGIANS: CLEMENT AND ORIGEN

Among Alexandrian theologians there developed the closest relationship with Greek philosophy which early Christianity achieved without entirely losing contact with the developing mainstream of the Church. This was hardly surprising, since the Christian schools in which Clement of Alexandria and Origen taught were outcrops of the most famous centres of higher education in the ancient world. Jews, Greeks and Egyptians had lived side by side in Alexandria for centuries; it was natural that gnosticism should flourish here and that its boundary with Christianity should be very permeable. Clement was not at all shy of annexing the word
gnosis
('knowledge') from his rivals, and he was very ready to defend a proposition that 'The man of understanding and perspicacity is . . . a Gnostic', or to speak of Christians living 'perfectly and gnostically'.
⁸¹
In the eyes of many later unsympathetic writers, both he and Origen had stepped over the borders which could be considered orthodox for Christianity. It is no coincidence that many of Clement's and Origen's writings are lost to us. When one manuscript might be the only source of a particular work and might easily crumble to dust in obscurity if someone did not think it worth copying, quiet ecclesiastical censorship could make sure that many works of these dangerous and audacious masters remained uncopied and so disappeared from sight.

About 190, Clement, a much-travelled scholarly Christian convert, succeeded a now obscure teacher called Pantaenus as the most prominent leader in the Christian schools of Alexandria. Twelve years later, he was caught up in a crisis of persecution far away from Alexandria in the Cappadocian city of Caesarea in Asia Minor; here he looked after the harassed Christian community and even brought new people into it.
⁸²
Yet even after he had proved his pastoral abilities in a desperate situation, his writings show that he regarded knowledge not merely as a useful intellectual tool of analysis for a Christian but as the door to a higher form of Christian spiritual life. Like Plato, whom he much admired, he believed that knowledge increases one's moral worth. There is an intellectual elitism both in his writings and in those of Origen which many Christians found unhealthy.