Fields of Blood (30 page)

In 270, the year of Constantine’s birth, a young
Egyptian peasant had walked to church lost in thought.
Antony had just inherited a sizable piece of land from his parents but found this good fortune an intolerable burden. He was only eighteen years old, yet now he had to provide for his sister, take a wife, have children, and toil on the farm for the rest of his life to support them all. In Egypt, where
famine loomed whenever the
Nile failed to flood, starvation was always a real threat, and most people accepted this relentless struggle as inevitable.
²⁹
But Jesus had said: “I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat and about your body and how to clothe it.”
³⁰
Antony also remembered that the first Christians had sold all their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor.
³¹
Still musing on these texts, he entered the church only to hear the priest reading Jesus’s words to a rich young man: “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in
heaven.”
³²
Immediately Antony sold his property and embarked on a quest for freedom and holiness that would become a countercultural challenge to both the Christianized Roman state and the new worldly, imperial Christianity. Like other monastic communities we have considered, Antony’s followers would try to model a more egalitarian and compassionate way for people to live together.

For the first fifteen years, like other “
renouncers” (
apotaktikoi
), Antony lived at the very edge of his village; then he moved to the tombs on the periphery of the desert and finally ventured farther into the wilderness than any other monk, living for years in an abandoned fortress beside the Red Sea until, in 301 he began to attract disciples.
³³
In the immensity of the desert, Antony discovered a tranquillity (
hesychia
) that put worldly care into perspective.
³⁴
Saint Paul had insisted that Christians must support themselves,
³⁵
so Egyptian monks either worked as
day laborers or sold their produce in the market. Antony grew vegetables so that he could offer hospitality to passing travelers, because learning to live kindly with others and sharing your wealth was essential to his monastic program.
³⁶

For some time, Egyptian peasants had engaged in this type of disengagement (
anchoresis
) to escape economic or social tension. During the third century, there had been a crisis of human relations in the villages. These farmers were prosperous but acerbic and quick with their fists, yet the village’s tax burden and the need for cooperation to control the floodwaters of the Nile obliged them to live in unwelcome proximity with uncongenial neighbors.
³⁷
Success was often resented. “Although I possess a good deal of land and am occupied with its cultivation,” one farmer explained, “I am not involved with any person in the village but keep to myself.”
³⁸
When neighborly relationships became unendurable, therefore, people would sometimes retire to the very edge of the settlement.
³⁹
But once
Christianity reached the Egyptian countryside in the late third century, anchoresis was no longer a disgruntled withdrawal but had become a positive choice to live according to the gospel in a way that offered a welcome and challenging alternative to the acrimony and tedium of settled life. The monk (
monachos
) lived alone (
monos
), seeking the “freedom from care” (
amerimmia
) that
Jesus had prescribed.
⁴⁰

Like the renouncers of previous times, the monks set up a counterculture, casting off their functional role in the agrarian economy and rejecting its inherent violence. A monk’s struggle began as soon as he left his village.
⁴¹
At first, explained one of the greatest of these anchorites, he was plagued by terrifying thoughts “of lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor, fear of the starvation that will ensue, of the sickness that follows undernourishment, and the deep shame of having to accept the necessities of life from the hands of others.”
⁴²
Their greatest task, however, was to still the violent impulses that lurk in the depths of the human psyche. The monks often described their struggles as a battle with demons, which we moderns usually understand as sexual temptations. But they were less preoccupied by sex than we are: Egyptian monks usually avoided women because they symbolized the economic burden they wanted to escape.
⁴³
Far more threatening than sex to these sharp-tongued Egyptian peasants was the “demon” of anger.
⁴⁴
However provocative the circumstances, monks must never respond aggressively to any attack. One abbot ruled that there was no excuse for
violent speech, even if your brother “plucks out your right eye and cuts off your right hand.”
⁴⁵
A monk must not even look angry or make an impatient gesture.
⁴⁶
These monks meditated constantly on Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” because most of them
did
have enemies in the community.
⁴⁷
Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), one of the most influential monastic teachers, drew on
Paul’s doctrine of kenosis and instructed monks to empty their minds of the rage, avarice, pride, and vainglory that tore the soul apart and made them close their hearts to others. By following these precepts, some learned to transcend their innate belligerence and achieved an interior peace that they experienced as a return to the
Garden of Eden, when human beings had lived in harmony with one another and with God.

The monastic movement spread more rapidly, demonstrating a widespread hunger for an alternative to a
Christianity that was increasingly tainted by imperial associations. By the end of the fifth century, tens of thousands of monks were living beside the
Nile and in the deserts of
Syria, Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and
Armenia.
⁴⁸
They had, wrote
Athanasius, created a spiritual city in the wilderness that was the antithesis of the worldly city, supported by
taxation, oppression, and military aggression.
⁴⁹
Instead of creating an
aristocracy that lived off the labor of others, monks were self-sufficient and existed at subsistence level, and whatever surplus they produced, they gave to the poor. Instead of the Pax
Romana enforced by martial violence, they cultivated hesychia and systematically rid their minds of anger, violence, and hatred. Like Constantine, Antony was venerated by many as
epigeios theos,
a “god on earth,” but he ruled with kindness rather than coercion.
⁵⁰
The monks were the new “friends of God” whose power had been achieved by a self-effacing lifestyle that had no earthly profit.
⁵¹

After the Council of
Nicaea, some Christians began to fall out of love with their emperors. They had expected Christian Rome to become a utopia that would somehow eliminate the cruelty and violence of the imperial state, but they found instead that Roman belligerence had infiltrated the Church. Constantine, his son Constantius II (r. 337–61), and their successors continued the struggle for consensus, using force when necessary, and their victims called them “persecutors.” First, it was Athanasius’s “Nicenes” who suffered, but after the Council of
Constantinople
(381), which made Athanasius’s creed the official faith of the empire, it was the
Arians’ turn. There were no formal executions, but people were massacred when soldiers invaded a church to break up a
heretical gathering, and increasingly both sides complained far more about their opponents’ violence than about their theology. In the early years, while Athanasius still enjoyed Constantine’s favor, Arians complained of his “greed, aggression, and boundless ambition”
⁵²
and accused him of “force,” “murder,” and the “killing of bishops.”
⁵³
For their part, the Nicenes vividly described the rattling weapons and flashing swords of the imperial troops, who thrashed their deacons and trampled worshippers underfoot.
⁵⁴
Both sides dwelled obsessively on their enemies’ vicious treatment of the consecrated virgins,
⁵⁵
and both revered their dead as “
martyrs.” Christians were developing a history of grievance that intensified during the brief but dramatic reign of the emperor
Julian (361–63), known as “the Apostate.”

Despite his Christian upbringing, Julian had come to detest the new faith, convinced it would ruin the empire. Many of his subjects felt the same. Those who still loved the old rites feared that this violation of the
Pax Deorum would result in political catastrophe. Throughout the imperial domains, Julian appointed pagan priests to sacrifice to the One God worshipped under many names—as
Zeus,
Jupiter,
Helios, or in the
Hebrew Bible, “God Most High.”
⁵⁶
He removed Christians from public office, gave special privileges to towns that had never adopted Christianity, and announced that he would rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Julian was careful to avoid outright persecution but merely boosted pagan sacrifice, refurbished pagan shrines, and covertly encouraged anti-Christian violence.
⁵⁷
Over the years a great deal of pent-up resentment had accumulated against the Church, and when Julian’s edicts were published, in some towns pagans rioted against Christians, who now discovered how vulnerable they really were.

Once again, some Christians responded to the state that had suddenly turned against them with the defiant gesture of martyrdom. Most of the martyrs who died during these two years were either killed by pagan mobs or put to death by local officials for their provocative attacks on pagan religion.
⁵⁸
As Jews began work on their new temple and pagans gleefully refurbished their shrines, conflict throughout the empire centered on iconic buildings. Ever since Constantine, Christians had become accustomed to seeing the decline of Judaism as the essential concomitant
to the triumph of the Church. Now as they watched the purposeful activity of the Jewish workmen on the
temple site in Jerusalem, they felt as if the fabric of their own faith had been undermined. At
Merum in
Phrygia, there was a more ominous development. While the local pagan temple was being repaired and the statues of the gods polished, three Christians, “unable to endure the indignity put upon their religion and impelled by a fervent zeal for virtue, rushed by night into the temple and broke the images in pieces.” This amounted to a suicide attack on a building that seemed to epitomize their new humiliation. Even though the governor urged them to repent, they refused, “declaring their readiness to undergo any sufferings, rather than pollute themselves by sacrificing.” Consequently, they were tortured and roasted to death on a gridiron.
⁵⁹
A new spate of martyr stories appeared, even more sensational than the original
Acta.