Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (54 page)

It is doubtful whether Cassian and Augustine would have differed much in their everyday practice of an austere Christian life, but Augustine's view of grace offended Cassian's theology of salvation, grounded as it was in the rival tradition of Origen and Evagrius. Cassian, like Pelagius, wanted to give human beings a sense of responsibility for their progress towards God, and Augustine's picture of humans stranded helplessly in their 'lump of lostness' threatened this possibility.
⁶⁹
He penned some fairly open and pointed criticisms of Augustine's assertions; he found a sympathetic audience among the monks of communities newly founded in south-eastern Gaul, for whom Cassian was a major inspiration and in many respects a founding father, and who have often been given a label intended to discredit their theology, 'Semi-Pelagians'. Augustine did have his admirers in Gaul: one monk, Prosper of Aquitaine, alerted the Bishop of Hippo to the controversy, and Augustine replied to his critics with two of his most savage treatises spelling out the logic of predestination. For many among the Gaulish monks, such statements transcended the bounds of acceptability.
⁷⁰

In particular, Vincent, a monk on the island of Lerins (Ile-Saint Honorat), admired much of Augustine's writings where he dealt with the Trinity and Christ's incarnation, but he also felt that on the subject of grace both Augustine and Prosper had gone beyond the bounds of doctrine as understood in the universal Church. He gave a definition of how doctrine should be judged properly Catholic or universal. It was what had been believed everywhere in the Church, always and by everyone ('
quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est
').
⁷¹
The formula has become a favourite of Catholic Christians, although the story of Christianity so far should give us a fair indication that, if applied with historical knowledge, it would leave a rather skeleton faith. Certainly it would exclude Augustine's theology of grace; yet it was Augustine whom the Western Church recognized as a saint, while ecclesiastical history left Cassian under a cloud of disapproval, like Origen and Evagrius before him. Nevertheless, Cassian's legacy went beyond controversy: he proved as important for Western monasticism as Evagrius in the East. Much as Cassian admired the Egyptian hermits, he felt that their life represented a way of perfection which was not for all, and that most ascetics should live in community. His instructions for such communities, principally set out in his
Institutes
, were of great influence on a later monk apparently born around 480, a half-century after Cassian's death. This monk, Benedict, admiring what Cassian had written, created a Rule which became the basis of Western monastic life.

Benedict is a shadowy figure who quickly attracted a good deal of legend, lovingly collected into a life by Pope Gregory I at the end of the sixth century. The implausibility of much of Gregory's narrative has led to suggestions that Benedict may not even have been a single individual, but a representative 'blessed one' (
Benedictus
in Latin), to whom a bundle of ideas came to be attributed as the 'Rule' of St Benedict, which was certainly compiled in the sixth century.
⁷²
In fact we now know that the Rule draws heavily on a previous text called 'The Rule of the Master' (
Regula Magistri
), probably drawn up some decades before, at the beginning of the sixth century. The later Rule both prunes the text and adds material, and the result is itself the best evidence against Benedict's identity having been constructed from the collective efforts of some committee of monastic founders. His changes breathe the simplicity, common sense and practical wisdom of a single gifted individual, with a sense of terse style, and a gentler, less autocratic attitude than the Master to the community which an abbot must lead. He is notably kindlier than the Master in the treatment which he offers to monks who fall ill.
⁷³

This Rule was intended to guide a number of monastic communities in south Italy, principally the mountain-top house of Monte Cassino (so cruelly bombarded to rubble during an epic siege in the Second World War). In the opening chapter, both the Master and Benedict give honourable mention to the hermit's vocation, seeing it as a more heroic stage of asceticism than community life, but then Benedict takes over the Master's brutally contemptuous description of two other variants on the monastic life: groups of two or three living without a Rule, and those individual monks who wandered from place to place - the Rule regards them as parasites on settled communities. This attitude set a pattern which made Western monasticism distinctive, because the wandering holy man remained a common and widely honoured figure in the Eastern Churches. The Rule was there to describe how to construct a single community, living in obedience to its abbot and under the same Rule as communities round it, yet fully independent of any other. That remains the characteristic of Benedictine monasteries to this day.

The developed Rule's single-minded emphasis on obedience, including the corporal punishment which is one of the abbot's ultimate physical sanctions, may seem very alien to modern individualism, but the author is intent on creating a balance between the spiritual growth of each monk and the general peace and well-being of the community in which he lives. Discipline, in fact, proved to be one of the chief attractions of Benedictine monasteries, in an age enmired in terrifying lawlessness which longed for the lost order of Roman society. The Rule is comparatively brief: a skin of parchment would have sufficed to copy it out - its last clause points out that there is much more that might be said about being a monk. Because of its simplicity, it has proved very adaptable, forming the basis of much Western monastic life for both men and women to the present day in societies very different from the decaying Classical world of the sixth century. In particular, monks within the Benedictine tradition creatively adapted Benedict's twin commands to 'labour and pray' so that labour might include scholarship. The shade of Jerome, who had taken so much trouble to shape that thought (see pp. 295-6), would be gratified, and otherwise the story of Western Europe would have been very different. It is to the expansion of this Western Christian society from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire that we now turn.

10

Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500-1000)

CHANGING ALLEGIANCES: ROME, BYZANTIUM AND OTHERS

The era spanning the collapse of the Western Roman Empire's political structures up to the tenth century, so often called the Dark Ages, was a rich and creative period in the development of the West, and 'early medieval' might describe it more neutrally and fairly. When did it begin? Something recognizable as Classical society survived in the western Mediterranean well after the Western Empire itself, only decisively changing in the later sixth century. The Roman aristocracy had been shattered by repeated wars in Italy, ironically mostly resulting from efforts by emperors in Constantinople to restore the old Italy under their own rule. Similar catastrophes crippled the old way of life in North Africa, leaving it weakened before Muslim onslaughts in the seventh century (see pp. 260-61). Perhaps most significantly, in the decades after 550, Latin culture came within a hair's breadth of extinction: the witness to that is the survival of datable manuscript copies of texts. The laborious process of copying manuscripts, the only way in which the fragile products of centuries of accumulating knowledge could be preserved, virtually came to an end, and would not be taken up again for two and a half centuries in the time of Charlemagne (see pp. 352-3). In the intervening period, much of Classical literature was lost to us for ever.

Politically, the area of the former empire was transformed into a series of 'barbarian' kingdoms, mostly ruled by Arian Goths, who preserved their Arianism as a mark of cultural distinction from the Catholic Christians of the old Latin world. The two cultures remained curiously separate side by side, with the Latin elite excluded from military service, paying tribute to Gothic leaders while preserving some shadowy rights of property as 'hosts' to 'guests' who never actually got round to leaving.
¹
We have already noted that young Gallo-Roman noblemen are said to have formed a disproportionate number of those joining the pioneer monasteries of Bishop Martin of Tours in the late fourth century, and that many of them went on to be bishops (see p. 313). Frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed. One suspects that capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service, or who had indeed started out as officials in it, now entered the Church as the main career option available to them, when in the East they still had the option of imperial bureaucracy. The Western Church has remained notable for the presence within its clerical ranks of a great many who are interested in clear rules and tidy filing systems. Western canon law was one of the West's intellectual achievements long before its systematization in the twelfth century (see p. 377), and Western theology has been characterized by a tidy-mindedness which reflects the bureaucratic precision of the Latin language: not always to the benefit of its spirituality.

How would the Western Latin Church as a whole react to this new situation? Would it look to the Greek East and identify itself wholeheartedly with the Byzantine attempt at reconquest? Would it disappear, like all the other institutions of the old empire? Would it follow the new configuration of power and melt into a series of Arian Churches, separated into the various ethnic groupings which now occupied the West? In fact the leadership of the Western Church chose a middle path which was to prove of huge significance for its future. It continued to stand aloof from the Arianism of the Gothic peoples, but it increasingly distanced itself from Constantinople, and it developed an increasing focus on the Bishop of Rome. This cautious approach to the new world became apparent when, in 493, the Arian Ostrogoth military leader Theoderic seized the city of Ravenna, at the head of the Adriatic, the last capital of the Western emperors. He established his rule there ostensibly as a subordinate of the Byzantine emperor but in reality as an independent monarch - one of such talent and capacity that even later Byzantine chroniclers had to give him grudging credit.
²
Theoderic's adoption of the sophisticated culture that he found is attested by a handful of superb buildings which survive from his rule in Ravenna. Among them is his own palace chapel, originally dedicated to the Redeemer, but now known because of a later Catholic rededication, as the 'new church' of St Apollinaris (Sant' Apollinare Nuovo - an older church near Ravenna had previously borne the same dedication to the alleged first bishop of the city). This is the grandest church building ever built in Italy for a non-Catholic version of the Christian faith, for the Arian monarch intended it for Arian worship. What is immediately visually striking on entering it is that this is a church of classic Christian basilican form (see Plate 4). Clearly it was not commissioned for leaders who were disrespectful of established Christian tradition, or who regarded their faith as anything other than central to it. Yet closer inspection reveals some interestingly individual features.

Some of the mosaics in Sant' Apollinare are contemporary with its construction in the early sixth century. Two sequences depicting the Court of Theoderic and notables at his port city of Classis both now make no visual sense, as the figures have rather ineptly been replaced by abstract mosaic designs; these heroic portrayals of a heretical monarch and his retinue could not be allowed a place of honour in what had become a Catholic building. One intact sequence of original mosaic friezes, safely remote from the viewer at the very highest level of the walls, although it spans the whole length of the church on either side of the nave, seems to emphasize the Arian view of the nature of Christ. It tells stories of Jesus Christ's life on earth: on the north side of the church the miracle worker and teller of parables is depicted as a young beardless man, while on the south side, which shows the Passion and Resurrection, he is portrayed as older and bearded. So the Redeemer lives his life and grows and matures as a truly human being who suffers as a human and yet is resurrected for our sakes (see Plate 19). Theoderic thus proclaimed his Arian faith to the world with all the resources of Christian art and architecture. Despite bombing hits in both world wars of the twentieth century, Sant' Apollinare and the other Ostrogothic survivals in Ravenna are among the few witnesses to Arian culture and literature, when virtually everything else produced by the Arians has been deliberately erased from the record. Here we glimpse the splendour and richness of Arian Christianity, elsewhere so successfully obliterated by the medieval Latin Church of the West.

Alongside his lavish gifts to the Arian Church, Theoderic allowed the Catholic Church to flourish, and used the skills of Roman and Catholic aristocrats in his administration. The most distinguished and learned of them, Boethius, was also one of the least fortunate: his service at Court ended around 524 with his execution on charges of treasonous intrigue with the Byzantines. Yet he played a great part in shaping the future of Christian culture in the West. Boethius had a fluency in Greek which was increasingly rare in the West: he knew its literature widely and intimately. He had planned to undertake a major programme of translations of Plato and Aristotle into Latin; in the end he completed only a few of Aristotle's treatises on logic, but books which could provide a structured framework for clear thinking were precious enough amid the increasingly scarce resources of scholarship in the West. Equally significant was the treatise which Boethius wrote in prison while awaiting execution,
The Consolation of Philosophy
. There is not much that is Christian about the
Consolation
: it is the work of a man whose intellectual formation has been in Neoplatonism. Yet that was part of its value. It embedded Plato in Western thought for the next few centuries as surely as did the works of Augustine (and in the same fashion at one remove from Plato himself); the spirit of serenity in the face of death which it expressed was an impressive reminder to Western clergy and would-be scholars that the philosophers who had been ignorant of Christ were worth listening to with respect.