The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (21 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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Watch the eyes of a liberal when you tell him this: Christianity brought to the world our modern notion of “equality” (though in a wiser form than what is preached today).
Sometimes in the history of man one idea, well expressed and preached by people afire with zeal, makes all the difference. Consider the ringing cry, a garbled echo of Moses and Jesus and Paul, “All men are created equal.” The affirmation that man is saved by Christ, in Christ, is such an idea. For most pagans, this made no sense. You were created chosen or not. For an atheist this makes no sense. In our material selves (our atoms, our genes, our muscles) we evidently are all different from birth. But Christianity affirms that in our dignity before the Lord, we are equal.
That faith is meant to leaven one’s life; and in this way the new Christians are at one with their elder brothers, the Jews. But it is not a set of cultural rules. It is a relationship to the person of Christ, adaptable to all cultures, at all times, everywhere. It could be Jewish or Armenian, Ethiopian or Persian, Greek or Roman; and soon after Paul it would be all these. We now preach “tolerance,” by which, as I’ve suggested, we mean two contradictory things: a refusal to distinguish between true and false and good and evil, and a supine submission to the politically correct rules of an intelligentsia. It is intolerance, with hair spray and a smile.
The first Christians, who endured periods of persecution and long ages of contempt, set upon by spies after their property or emperors after their blood, learned tolerance by living it. They dwelt among people who traded in slaves, exposed babies on the hillsides, seduced young boys, and made homicide into daily entertainment in the arena. And they brought them to the faith without making them a whit the less Roman or Greek, rather returning them to the noblest virtues of their own traditions.
For Christianity, rightly understood, fairly invents the virtue of tolerance, precisely because, as Saint Paul says, the Lord wants sons, not slaves. You could get along in the Roman Empire if you submitted to worshiping Rome and the Emperor. It didn’t matter what you really thought, so long as you made that public act of submission. If you stand before a witness in Saudi Arabia and say, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,” no one will probe too deeply into the corners of your heart. What lies there is of no consequence, so long as you go on to obey the law of the prophet. You are a submitter, a Muslim.
It’s the same with contemporary political correctness. If you nod as someone says, “Women can make effective soldiers, just as men,” it doesn’t matter whether you know that your nephew riding the bench for his junior high football team could put a hurt on the typical Private Benjamin. What matters is your outward submission.
But you cannot be compelled to accept Christ, because that acceptance is an act of your will, an act of faith, hope, and love. Christians could not compel conversions any more than they could compel love. The notion makes no sense, and that is why they very rarely even made the mistaken attempt. They
evangelized:
literally, they brought the good news that man was not given up to sin and suffering and death.
evangelized:
literally, they brought the good news that man was not given up to sin and suffering and death.
In part the Christians did this without any grand plan. They wanted to live their ordinary lives among their countrymen, in peace. But they had a problem. Their private meetings to celebrate the Eucharist and to hear the word of God were suspected. Roman emperors were always wary of “secret” groups, and for good reason, given the life expectancy of those who were elevated to that honor.
But long before the imperial chaos of the third century, the Christians were accused of heinous practices. They were thought to murder children and eat their flesh; that was an obvious pagan garbling of the Christian meal, when the faithful would partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.
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So Pliny the Younger, an official of the generally wise emperor Trajan (98–117), writes to Rome to ask what to do about these pestilent people who will not worship the pagan gods or sacrifice to an image of the emperor. Pliny’s tribute is all the more impressive in that he intends it as criticism:
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So Pliny the Younger, an official of the generally wise emperor Trajan (98–117), writes to Rome to ask what to do about these pestilent people who will not worship the pagan gods or sacrifice to an image of the emperor. Pliny’s tribute is all the more impressive in that he intends it as criticism:
Those who deny that they are or ever have been Christian I have thought well to dismiss, so long as they would invoke our gods as I dictated the formula, and pray to your image, which I would have commanded to be brought in along with the statues of the gods, would pray with offerings of incense and wine, and then curse Christ—none of which things a true Christian can ever be compelled to do, as I have been told. (
Letters
, 10.96)
Pliny cannot understand such “pertinacity,” and believes it should be punished. Hubert Poteat observes tartly, “We may be reasonably sure that very few Romans, if threatened with the alternative of death, would have hesitated a moment to deny the whole Capitoline hierarchy”—the whole panoply of official gods, including those scarred, bloated, disease-raddled gods known as emperors.
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The Romans had long respected the integrity and ferocity of Jewish devotion to their sole God, though many thought it narrow-minded, even atheistic. But by the time the Christians came on the scene, the Roman pantheon had been absorbed by the State. You could believe in any god you pleased, so long as you also bowed to the State gods. You could say, with a wink, “Ah yes, Jupiter, ravisher of women, a figment of rude imaginations,” so long as you took part in the devotions to the Capitoline protector. The gods might or might not be real, but the State certainly was. So the Romans, who had breached the last-resort Jewish fortress of Masada in 73, were not going to encourage another outbreak of religion, which was then, as now, the single greatest threat to the omnipotence of the State.
Love God, or Hate the WorldWe may chart the degeneration of the Christian belief in the goodness of the created world thus:The world is beautiful, because it was created by God (Augustine, Aquinas, Francis).
The world is beautiful, and it happens to have been created by a God (the Deist Voltaire).
The world is beautiful, but it was not created by God (the early Darwin).
The world is not beautiful, and it was not created by God (the later Darwin).
Because the world is not beautiful, it was not created by God (Richard Dawkins).
But the world is beautiful. Not only that, but intelligible, too, even that part of the world inhabited by slovenly modern atheists.
That’s how we should understand Roman persecutions of the Christians. They weren’t a battle between Jupiter and Jehovah, but between two visions of the world. It was an episode in the constant battle, as Augustine put it later, between The City of Man, characterized by empire and lust for domination, and The City of God, characterized by
caritas
, selfless love, with plenty who thought they belonged to one army actually fighting for the other.
5
caritas
, selfless love, with plenty who thought they belonged to one army actually fighting for the other.
5
What else can explain the persecutions, not characteristic of Roman governance? Not crimes. The Christians are agreeable citizens, Justin Martyr pleads to the good emperor Antoninus Pius.
6
They don’t get drunk in public, they don’t rob, they are forbidden to lie, they don’t take vengeance against their enemies, they don’t divorce a wife to steal their neighbor’s. Nor do they expose their children to die. So Clement of Alexandria inveighs against that form of birth control for Roman matrons who prefer pets to babies: “They do not receive the orphan child; but they expose children that are born at home, and take up the young of birds, and prefer irrational to rational creatures” (
Paedogogus,
3.4).
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They don’t get drunk in public, they don’t rob, they are forbidden to lie, they don’t take vengeance against their enemies, they don’t divorce a wife to steal their neighbor’s. Nor do they expose their children to die. So Clement of Alexandria inveighs against that form of birth control for Roman matrons who prefer pets to babies: “They do not receive the orphan child; but they expose children that are born at home, and take up the young of birds, and prefer irrational to rational creatures” (
Paedogogus,
3.4).
But the Christians threaten the self-conception of the Empire. They were dangerous not because they were disobedient, but because the God they obeyed, while commanding them to obey legitimate state authority, could brook no rival. The State could be
under
God, but it could not be
beside
God. The Romans, having lost a vital faith in the gods, turned to the State instead, and were in danger of losing both God and State. The Christians, with their vital faith in God, remained in the State that hated them, and saved it from its delusions. The pagans testify to the influence the Christians wielded by being good, far more than great or high. The Emperor Julian (r. 361–363), called the Apostate for his reversion to pagan Stoicism, in urging his fellow pagans to help him revive the glory of old Rome, complains that the Christians not only cared for one another when they were sick or poor but they also did a better job caring for the pagans than the pagans themselves did.
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under
God, but it could not be
beside
God. The Romans, having lost a vital faith in the gods, turned to the State instead, and were in danger of losing both God and State. The Christians, with their vital faith in God, remained in the State that hated them, and saved it from its delusions. The pagans testify to the influence the Christians wielded by being good, far more than great or high. The Emperor Julian (r. 361–363), called the Apostate for his reversion to pagan Stoicism, in urging his fellow pagans to help him revive the glory of old Rome, complains that the Christians not only cared for one another when they were sick or poor but they also did a better job caring for the pagans than the pagans themselves did.
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