Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (5 page)

Greek gods are rather human; so may humans be rather like gods, and go on trying to be as like them as possible? The remarkable self-confidence of Greek culture, the creativity, resourcefulness and originality and the consequent achievements which have been borrowed by Christian culture, have much to do with this attitude to the gods embedded in the Homeric epics. It is very different from the way in which the Jews came to speak of the remote majesty of their one God, the all-powerful creator, who (at relentless length) angrily reminded the afflicted Job how little a lone created being like him understood divine purposes; who dismissed Moses's question 'What is your name?' with a terrifying cosmic growl out of a burning bush in the desert, 'I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE'.
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The name of the God of Israel is No Name.

Greeks could not be accused of marginalizing religion, for Greek cities were not dominated visually by palaces, as they had been in Mycenaean culture; instead they focused themselves around temples. Such temples will be familiar from that iconic and exceptionally splendid example in Athens, the Parthenon of the goddess Pallas Athene, and the most superficial examination of their layout will reveal that however monumental Greek temples appear, their chief function was not to house a large worshipping congregation, but to house a particular god, like the shrine-churches dedicated to an individual holy figure which Christians built later. Temples were served by priests, who performed local rituals for a god or gods in approved customary fashion, but who were not normally seen as a caste apart from the rest of the population. They were doing a job on behalf of the community, rather like other officials of the city, who might collect taxes or regulate the market. So Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values, and it was not policed by a self-perpetuating elite entrusted with any task of propagating or enforcing it.

Such a system is not hospitable to the idea of heresy, to which (as we will see) certain varieties of Christianity have consistently been attracted. It is true that Socrates, one of the greatest of Greek philosophers, was tried and executed in 399 BCE after accusations that his disbelief in his society's gods (and his rhetoric generally) corrupted young people, but Socrates lived in a time of huge political crisis and he could be seen as a threat to Athenians' hard-won democracy (see pp. 30-31). Generally Greeks' esteem for their gods did not place limits on their hunger to make sense of the world around them, and they could see that stories about the gods left unanswered many questions about being and reality. Maybe answers could be extracted by trying to make as tidy a system as possible out of the stories: the first surviving Greek literature in prose is a varied set of records of these traditional stories, 'mythographies'. The poet Hesiod, writing in the same era as Homer, created an epic,
Theogony
, which later generations regarded with gratitude as the most accessible effort at making sense of the tangle.

Within the common Greek culture, then, was an urge to understand and create a systematic structure of sacred knowledge which ordered their everyday life. Greeks so esteemed Homer's two epics that they extended this quest to the Homeric stories. A volume of commentary was developed on what they were really about, under the narrative surface. Greek curiosity created the literary notion of allegory: a story in literature which must be read as conveying a deeper meaning or meanings than is at first apparent, with the task of a commentator to tease out such meanings. Much later, first Jews and then Christians treated their sacred writings in the same way. Greeks were convinced that the learning of a race as ancient as the Egyptians must conceal wisdom which ought to be shared more widely, and when they eventually encountered Jewish literature, they likewise found its antiquity impressive. But they were not afraid to turn from the past to search anew for wisdom for themselves. That search for wisdom they entrusted to people whom they defined as lovers of wisdom: philosophers.

Some concerns of philosophers were not new. Long before in Babylon and Egypt, let alone in cultures which have left no written records as far north as the isles of Shetland, people spent a good deal of time considering the skies above them; the movements of stars and planets had practical relevance to the passage of time in their farming and religious observances. Greek philosophy was far more all-encompassing, and its obsession with questioning, classifying and speculating has little parallel in the earlier cultures of which the Greeks had knowledge. The fact that Greeks adopted an alphabetic script has often been seen as one of the stimuli to their achievements in philosophy, since it is rather easier to convey abstract ideas in the easily learned handful of symbols in alphabets than in the multiple pictorial symbols of pictogrammic script. But that hardly explains why Phoenicians or Jews were not stimulated by their own alphabetic writing systems to produce anything like the intellectual adventures of the Greeks.

A better answer must lie in the peculiar history of the Greeks which emerged from their early geography: that proliferation of tiny independent communities eventually scattered from Spain to Asia Minor. Each of these was a
polis
- another of those Greek words like
logos
which at first sight seems easy to translate into English, in this case as 'city'. Even if the meaning of the word is given one more layer of sophistication as 'city-state', the translation is inadequate to convey the resonance of
polis
, with the same sort of difficulty one might find in speaking of the resonance of the English word 'home'.
Polis
was more than the cluster of houses around a temple which was its visible embodiment and gave it its name. The
polis
included the surrounding mountains, fields, woods, shrines, as far as its frontiers; it was the collective mind of the community who made it up, and whose daily interactions and efforts at making decisions came to constitute 'politics'. We will need to consider the politics of the
polis
at some length to understand just why the Greeks made their remarkable contribution to shaping the West and the versions of Christianity which it created.

In the end, the mega-states of Macedonia and then Rome swallowed up the freedom of these
poleis
. Nevertheless, more than a millennium after Homer's time, the life of the Greek
polis
still represented an ideal even for those Mediterranean societies which had turned to Christianity. In the words of the great twentieth-century philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood: 'Deep in the mind of every Roman, as in the mind of every Greek, was the unquestioned conviction which Aristotle put into words: that what raised man above the level of barbarism . . . to live well instead of merely living, was his membership of an actual, physical city.'
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When Christians first described their own collective identity, with its customs, structures and officer-bearers, they used the Greek word
ekklesia
, which has passed hardly modified into Latin and its successor languages. Greek-speaking Jews before the Christians had used the same word to speak of Israel.
Ekklesia
is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means 'Church', but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the assembly of citizens of the
polis
who met to make decisions.

So the
ekklesia
represents the
polis
, a local identity within the greater whole of Christianity or Christendom, just as the Greek
polis
represented the local identity of the greater whole
Hellas
, 'Greekdom'. Yet the Christian
ekklesia
has become more complicated, because the word can also describe the universal Church, the equivalent of
Hellas
, as well as the local - not to mention the fragments of universal Christianity with particular identities which call themselves 'Church', and even the buildings which house all these different entities. There is a further interesting dimension of the word. If the
ekklesia
is the embodiment of the city or
polis
of God, lurking in the word
ekklesia
is the idea that the faithful have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the
polis
, just as the people of a
polis
did in ancient Greece. This creates a tension with another borrowing from Greek which has passed into several northern European languages, and which appears in English as the word 'church' or in Scots English as 'kirk'. This started life as an adjective which emerged in late Greek,
kuriake
, 'belonging to the Lord', and because of that, it emphasizes the authority of the master, rather than the decision of those assembled. The tension between these perspectives has run through the history of
ecclesia/
kirk, and is with Christians still.

The original Greek association of
polis
and
ekklesia
emerged out of political and social turmoil in an age which, thanks to modern historians' urge to label periods of time, has been given the collective description 'Archaic Greece' (roughly 800-500 BCE).
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Most Archaic city-states were initially ruled by groups of noblemen, but during those three centuries, many governing elites faced challenges from those who saw them as misgoverning. The common Greek institution of slavery for non-paid debt created a steadily more divided society and undermined the ability of cities to defend themselves with armies of free inhabitants. Population rise strained resources. That was one reason why particular cities sent off citizens to found replica cities, colonies, in new areas of the Mediterranean - Massalia or Massilia (Marseilles) in the south of France, for instance, was one of the earliest of those colonies, founded from the Ionian city of Phocaea far away on the west coast of Asia Minor. Even that safety valve did not end trouble, which at various stages in different places resulted in the overthrow of existing regimes. In the interests of avoiding chaos and restoring stability, power generally came into the hands of a single individual, styled a
tyrannos
. Originally without the present sinister connotation of 'tyrant', this term simply described a ruler who could not appeal to any traditional legitimacy. The first recorded seizure of power by a
tyrannos
took place in Corinth in the 650s BCE.

Such political coups were hardly unprecedented in human history, but most ancient cultures disguised them with some sort of appeal to a higher divine approval: witness the way in which the books of Samuel in the Hebrew scriptures present the usurper David's takeover from the dynasty of Saul as God's deliberate abandonment of the old king for his disobedience.
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Perhaps there were simply too many sudden political disruptions in the various city-states of Archaic Greece to make divine involvement plausible; so if a
tyrannos
was to exercise authority without any traditional or religious justification, there would have to be some other basis for government. The solution which the Greeks adopted held great significance for the future. The inhabitants of the
polis
who had acquiesced in the upheaval would decide on laws with which their community would be governed. This was a radically new way of conceiving power. Even where a Greek
polis
gave credit to some particular named person as its lawgiver, whether legendary or real - the name is Solon in Athens, and Lycurgus in Sparta - this still meant that a human being had made decisions about structuring justice and government without any especial involvement of the gods. The great lawmakers of other cultures had claimed divine authority for their law codes, like King Hammurabi in Babylon of the eighteenth century BCE, or Moses, whom the Jews portrayed as bringing God's detailed instructions down from a mountain with the full panoply of thunder, fire and cloud, his face unnaturally transfigured with light.
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The self-confidence which is such a recurrent feature of Greek culture meant that Greeks could make laws without such theatrics. The
tyrannos
was (or should be) subject to those laws like everyone else.
¹¹

It is unsurprising that not all
tyrannoi
consistently agreed with this proposition, and their regimes did not generally last long before they were removed. That led to the culminating step in the evolution of the independent Greek
polis
: cities moved to a form of government in which every male citizen over the age of thirty meeting in the
ekklesia
had a voice in policymaking (once more, like 'politics', the word 'policy' is a derivative of
polis
). The system, new in the recorded history of Asian, African or European civilization, was called democracy: rule by ordinary people (or rule by the mob, if one was feeling sour about the idea). A lead was taken by Athens, one of the most centrally positioned, dramatically sited and generally flamboyant of Greek cities, where, in 510 BCE, two years of civil war after the overthrow of a
tyrannos
culminated in the establishment of a democracy. This is often seen as one of the key symbolic dates in the transition from the Archaic to the 'Classical' period in Greek history, during which Greek democracy enjoyed two centuries of extraordinary achievement which has remained central to the Mediterranean and then the Western cultural experience.
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It was the democratic institutions of Athens which caught the imagination of subsequent generations, and turned the city into something of a theme park of the Greek Way of Life, long after the comparatively brief period during which Athenian democracy had actually functioned. The general Classical fascination with Athens may be one reason why virtually no Greek poetry which is not Athenian has survived from an extraordinarily creative period in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.
¹³